Cleaning Cooperatively: An analysis of the success and potential of a cooperative business
By
Virginia L. Doellgast
B.A. Community, Regional, and Environmental Studies
Bard College, 1998
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING IN
PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER IN CITY PLANNING
AT THE
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
JUNE 2001
ROTCH
@2001 Virginia L. Doellgast. All rights reserved.
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce
and to distribute publicly paper and electronic
copies of the thesis document in whole or in part.
Signature of Author:
M
MASSACHUSETTS iNSTITUTE
OF TECHNOLOGY
JUL 3 1 2001
I
LIBRARIES
Department of Urban Studies and'Pl'anning
May 17, 2001
Certified by:
ChiifPilly
Visiting Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Thesis Supervisor
Accepted by:
Dennis Frenchma'n
Chairman, MCP Committee
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Cleaning Cooperatively: An analysis of the success and potential of a
cooperative business
by
Virginia L. Doellgast
Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
on May 17, 2001, in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Degree of Master in City Planning
ABSTRACT
In this study, I evaluate a cooperative cleaning business's success in improving
employment outcomes for immigrant workers. Cooperative business development is often
undertaken as a community economic development strategy that seeks to promote better
work experiences for those with limited employment options. The argument that
ownership and control in the workplace are key features of such a strategy is superficially
easy to accept, but becomes more problematic when trade-offs among goals and outcomes
are introduced.
To better understand the nature of these trade-offs, I compare employment outcomes and
business strategy across four different cleaning companies: a cooperative cleaning
business, a maid service franchise, a unionized janitorial firm, and an independent
housecleaner. While wages and benefits do not differ substantially across the four cases,
cooperatives provide opportunities for training and mobility, control over work and over
management of the business, and a sense of satisfaction that are unusual in the cleaning
industry and of value to their members.
These findings are tempered by the observation that these cleaning cooperatives remain a
scattered set of experiments that often must struggle to sustain themselves. Enjoying the
benefits of cooperative ownership may require members to sacrifice time and salary, and
may in the short-term hamper business growth and profitability. The strategies used by
successful cooperative and non-cooperative cleaning businesses provide a useful guide to
these businesses as they seek to meet the dual goals of providing better work experiences
for their members and successfully competing within the cleaning industry.
Thesis Supervisor: Chris Tilly
Title: Visiting Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped me along the way in the writing of this thesis. The five
cooperative members with whom I have worked for over a year provided the inspiration
and material for my research. Each allowed me a good chunk of their very scarce time to
probe and prod them with questions, and taught me a great deal in the process. The other
cleaning workers, managers, union representatives, and non-profit staff I interviewed were
likewise generous with their time and their knowledge.
Chris Tilly provided valuable insights and many detailed edits, acting as both
conscientious thesis advisor and friend as I tried to make sense of my often confused
findings. Karl Seidman and Lisa Peattie, my readers, added helpful suggestions at the
beginning and end of the process. Because all good thought is sustained by good food and
conversation, I am indebted to Mel and Cat, my rambunctious roommates who cooked and
talked me through my last semester. And finally, I owe a big thank you to Ian for sharing
his unflagging interest in all things labor-related and his devotion to my emotional wellbeing. Without him this year would have been considerably less of an adventure.
This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother, who got her start in this country cleaning
houses
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Locating cooperatives in theory and in history _-
9
Chapter 2
Methodology
...-.......
Chapter 3
The cleaning industry and cleaning work
Chapter 4
Cooperatives in the cleaning industry
Chapter 5
Conclusions and Recommendations_
35
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.. ____
-.
__.78
Appendices
Appendix A
Individuals interviewed
_.._-_-_-_-_-....8---------------------------------------------86
Appendix B
Interview questions for workers
Appendix C
Interview questions for managers
Appendix D
Interview questions for cleaning cooperatives
Bibliography ----- _-__._--_-
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87
91
94
Introduction
I began working with Eco-cleaning, a small cooperative cleaning business, during my second
semester at MIT. The first project I was assigned as part of my internship at a Community
Development Corporation was to help the cooperative evaluate their business and develop a
business plan. I met weekly with the five Latino members of the cooperative, first working with a
popular educator to help them develop a mission statement and evaluation tools, and then
facilitating the evaluation. This seven month process gave me an opportunity to get to know
these members well, and to observe how they worked and solved problems together as a group.
After months of mediating conflicts, listening to problems, and writing lists of possible strategies
to address these problems, I began to ask, what is so special about this cooperative to the workermembers who have stuck with it for three years? They are doing the same cleaning work they
were doing previously for various cleaning firms. They have to attend meetings, they must take
on additional business management and marketing responsibilities, and their pay is backed up
several months. There are conflicts within the group and with the manager they hire.
Employment is also not very secure: the customer base fluctuates, and the business, while
growing, has not yet reached a stable point where the members can feel confident that it will
continue to support them. I often wondered whether this cooperative really provided
employment that was different and better than the alternatives available to the members.
Yet when I ask the members of Eco-cleaning whether they prefer their jobs in the cooperative to
the part-time jobs most continue to hold in other cleaning firms, they invariably respond with a
definitive "i si!". The key distinction that they make between this job and their other jobs is their
ability to own and manage their own business. They value the opportunity to "be their own
boss", and the prospect of building a successful business together. They also feel that they are
learning new skills and moving forward, or "progressing", in the cooperative in a way they do not
have the opportunity to do in other cleaning jobs. These elements of worker ownership and
control, ongoing learning, and continual skill upgrading are the key benefits that cooperative
businesses are supposed to provide worker-members. It seemed this cooperative was providing
these benefits, but in the context of an ongoing struggle to develop as a profitable business.
In the following chapters, I will explore in greater depth the questions I began to ask the
members of Eco-cleaning. I want to understand what exactly is worth supporting about
cooperative ownership, as well as the opportunities and obstacles to making it work in the house
and office cleaning industries. This will shed some light on whether cooperative business
development is a viable strategy to improve employment outcomes for immigrants working in a
typically low-wage sector of the economy.
The questions that guide my research are the following:
e What criteriashould we use to evaluate employment outcomes from a "community economic
development" program?
e Can cooperative ownership of cleaningfirms help to bring about these desirableoutcomes?
e
Are there lessons from other cleaningfirms that can help guide cooperative business
development efforts?
To answer these questions, I first compare the goals and strategies articulated in the community
economic development and the cooperative business development literature. There are many
intersections, with a few important differences. Most notably, supporters of cooperatives claim
that participation in the workplace and ownership of capital are key factors promoting better
employment outcomes for workers. I then examine the history of, and justifications for,
supporting this form of business ownership.
This portion of my research lays the groundwork for a comparison of employment outcomes and
business success across four different house and office cleaning businesses: a cooperative
cleaning business, a unionized janitorial firm, a maid service franchise, and an independent house
cleaner. Interviews with workers and managers reveal differences in the compensation, training
and mobility, control, and satisfaction workers experience in each of these different work
arrangements. I find that wages and benefits do not differ a great deal better across the four
cases. Cooperative members do, however, enjoy a great deal of control over the organization of
work and of business management, and are provided with opportunities for training and mobility
not commonly found in other cleaning jobs. They also experience improved status and job
satisfaction from owning their business. I argue that cleaning cooperatives provide a unique
combination of these benefits, which are valued by their members.
These benefits do not, however, come in a neat and unambiguous package: enjoying them
requires some trade-offs and rests on a certain set of preferences. Immigrants end up working in
cleaning jobs for a variety of reasons, and coops may not be the best solution for all workers.
Owning a business requires members to sacrifice time and sometimes earnings. It also implies a
certain commitment to continue to do cleaning work, which may conflict with the goals of some
workers. For those who do wish to own their own business, who feel their opportunities are
limited within traditional cleaning firms, and who do not have the resources or skills to
independently manage a business, cooperatives are an opportunity difficult to find elsewhere
within the cleaning industry.
Having concluded that cooperative ownership does hold some promise of improving cleaning
jobs, I next ask whether cooperative ownership is a potentially sustainable and profitable way of
organizing a house and office cleaning business. If these are great jobs that require ongoing
subsidies, their benefits may be overshadowed by their cost. There are certain strengths
cooperatives possess, including their ability to target a niche market and motivate employees to
provide a quality service.
Nonetheless, cooperatives encounter quite a few obstacles to successfully competing with
mainstream cleaning firms. The time intensive process of participatory decision-making, the
long time frame required to develop management skills among worker-members, and the rather
loose control over scheduling may hamper business success and growth. Firms with hierarchical
decision-making structures may have to spend more energy and resources monitoring employee
behavior to assure quality, but are able to respond quickly and flexibly to customer demands.
These obstacles are not insurmountable, but overcoming them requires some effort and creativity.
The strategies used by successful cooperative and non-cooperative cleaning businesses hold
valuable lessons for a small, inexperienced cleaning firm.
Over the course of my research, I listened to many stories detailing the struggles of immigrants to
succeed in this country, where their hopes were frustrated along the way, and where they feel
their opportunities lie. This paper is an attempt to make sense of these stories, in order to better
understand whether one community economic development program holds promise as a strategy
to improve cleaning jobs for some of these workers. The richness of the lives I glimpsed in each
interview do not translate well into employment outcomes: stories of illegal border crossings and
abuses suffered in various jobs, descriptions of what it was like to live through the war in El
Salvador, pictures of pastel houses and smiling family members sent from home towns, all
placed the working lives of these immigrants within a context that is difficult to convey in full.
I have tried, however, to capture some portion of their experience, and in doing so to take part in
a dialogue about how best to bring about improvements in low-wage labor markets.
Cooperatives are not a panacea for the multiple struggles and needs of the immigrants I
interviewed. They are instead a set of experiments that provide rich material for thinking through
how the organization of work and the ownership structure of an enterprise influence the
outcomes workers experience, and the potential of the cooperative form of ownership to improve
upon these outcomes.
Chapter 1
Locating cooperatives in theory and in history
"Cooperative business development" is one of many strategies to improve the economic
opportunities available to groups with limited resources. Those who support cooperatives
compose a small but diverse movement based on the belief that worker ownership is a feasible,
in many cases preferable, means of organizing a business. It is a movement that is guided by the
goal of creating democratic workplaces in which control over resources and decision-making
power is distributed equitably among workers. These positive effects originate in the workplace,
but are believed to extend more broadly into the surrounding community. Cooperatives thus
represent a form of economic development intentionally undertaken in order to move beyond a
focus on jobs created to "shifting the capability of a population to take charge of its own
economy" (Wilkinson and Quarter, 1996).
Groups of workers, non-profits, churches, and Community Based Organizations (CBOs) have
organized a variety of collectively owned businesses. These range from agricultural cooperatives,
buyer cooperatives, and credit unions to Employee Stock Ownership Plans and worker-owned
cooperatives. The goals that motivate supporters and members of these organizations are very
similar to those proponents of "community economic development" articulate, including equity,
sustainability, and local control over resources. They are more specific about the most effective
way to attain these goals, however, emphasizing participation in making the decisions that affect
one's work and ownership and control over capital by workers within a firm. These
characteristics of cooperatives, it is argued, not only hold the promise of humanizing and
democratizing the workplace, but also improve productivity, increase investment in human
capital, and ensure that businesses will make stronger commitments to community needs.
In this chapter I will begin to answer the question, What does cooperative ownership contribute
to the theory and practice of "community economic development"? The philosophical and
theoretical justifications for cooperative ownership link a familiar range of community
development goals to the democratic ownership and management of businesses. A review of the
literature on cooperative ownership reveals a dearth of discussion about how to best achieve
these goals within different contexts and across different industries. There also appears to be
little critical evaluation of how the owners of these cooperative businesses and the organizations
supporting them make trade-offs when faced with conflicts or inconsistencies among goals. My
research seeks to address these gaps, by applying the theory of why cooperative ownership
should result in different and better employment outcomes to the practice of cooperative
ownership in a particular industry. I will now lay out the contributions this theory makes to the
discussion of what community economic development is, and how its objectives can best be
accomplished.
Cooperative business development as a community economic development
strategy
The cooperative business development movement locates itself within the wider umbrella of
"community economic development", identifying with many of its objectives. What
distinguishes community economic development from other economic development approaches
is its focus on place and interest in enhancing a range of social and economic goods available to a
group of people located in a place.
Other development approaches may emphasize serving a certain group of disadvantaged workers
through training, placement, or moving people closer to jobs. They may seek to create jobs
through attraction or retention of particular industries in a metropolitan region. Community
economic development proponents are interested in bringing together people and jobs, and often
support industrial development efforts. They distinguish their approach to economic
development, however, by insisting that success be measured in terms of just what kind of jobs
are created, who has power in these jobs, and whether the jobs improve the quality of life in a
place. They argue that solutions that seek to improve the fortunes of the poor must start in the
neighborhoods where they live, building a strong base of jobs, human capital, and networks they
can draw upon.
Ferguson and Dickens define community development as 'asset building that improves the
quality of life among residents of low- to moderate-income communities" (1999, p.5). Economic
development is often conceptualized as a change in the combinations of goods and services the
economy can produce, either through investments that change the production technology or
through a change in the institutional arrangements supporting the production process.
Community economic development brings these two ideas together, suggesting a different way of
improving access to opportunities where they are not currently abundant (Vidal 1994, p.172).
Albert Shapero articulates how this intersection might contribute to a new understanding of just
what economic development is: 1) Economic development does not happen "in general" but to
specific people in specific places; and 2) the goals of economic development at the local level
must go beyond "increased jobs and income". What we want for an area is to achieve a state
denoted by "resilience, creativity and innovativeness, initiative taking, and diversity" (1981,
pp.13-14). To these theorists, the private market is unable to correct for the inequality of
opportunities and outcomes many residents of poor communities face.
These authors express ideas that are common wisdom in the small non-profit organizations in
which I have worked. The notions that populations who experience barriers to securing good
jobs are concentrated in particular places, and that some of the characteristics of these places may
contribute to the persistence of these barriers, are not that controversial. The conclusion that
active program and policy intervention should be targeted at the community level is, however,
contested on several fronts. Some theorists and practitioners criticize place-based approaches as
too narrow in focus, arguing that the neighborhood or community must be properly
contextualized within the surrounding urban and regional economy (Teitz 1989). Others object
to the economic logic on which they are based, arguing that the market failures these programs
seek to correct could more effectively be addressed in the private market (Michelson 1981, Porter
1995).
These critiques are important to keep in mind when evaluating the potential or real success of a
community economic development initiative. If one concludes that it is appropriate to
concentrate talent and resources towards promoting economic development at the community
level, several questions and concerns remain. If there are trade-offs among economic and
employment outcomes, or if you are unable to achieve all of them in one program, how do you
prioritize? This question is important to an analysis of cooperative success, because they do
claim to provide multiple benefits in one fell swoop. Advocates generally present these benefits
as a range of social goods that justify the investment of resources in a business that may initially
require a great deal of support. The value assigned to each of these goods by both program
participants and the "community" is less well understood, but may be critical to successful design
and execution. The possibility of these trade-offs persists as an undercurrent to the ideal goals
and outcomes community economic development and cooperative business development
advocates put forth.
Community Economic Development Programs
Community economic development programs are based on three key objectives: increasing
economic activity in an area, promoting the capacity to sustain economic activity over time, and
improving the quality of life for residents. Getting residents into jobs that provide a living wage,
high quality work experiences, and opportunities for learning and advancement is a desirable
goal that should influence the focus of an economic development program. There appears to be a
great deal of consensus among community development advocates about the goals and outcomes
hoped for; divergence occurs in the discussion about just how to bring about these outcomes.
Most of the programs and campaigns that follow from these goals fall into three categories: 1)
promoting local ownership of firms, or supporting firms that are more rooted in and committed to
a local area; 2) providing access to better job opportunities through partnerships and training; and
3) organizing to bring about changes in the wages and structure of jobs. Each of these ideas calls
for a different program focus, which are in turn given varying levels of emphasis by the
organizations that design and implement them.
Small Business Development
An emphasis on local ownership of firms generally leads to a program focus on small business
development programs. These include provision of low-rent physical spaces for small business
owners, alternative lending institutions, micro-enterprise development programs, technical
assistance programs, business networks and associations, and direct business start-up or
ownership by a community group. Many of these efforts are grounded in the perceived benefits
to capturing money spent "outside of the community" and to assuring that profits from business
activity stay with local people. Others seek to create a strong export base. Their proponents
often believe that fostering entrepreneurial skills will create a more resilient and vibrant
economy. Gittell and Thompson describe the range of benefits associated with encouraging
small business ownership in low-income communities:
In the past three decades, commentators ranging from Robert Kennedy to the urban planner and
economist Jane Jacobs to the sociologist William Julius Wilson to the business management scholar
Michael Porter have concurred that the problems of the inner city are both causes and consequences of
the paucity of mainstream business and economic activities and opportunities there.... Business
contributes to the tax base of the community.. .business owners can be important political and social
actors that further the interest of a community. And, of course, business provides jobs.... Local
businesses, because of their practical interests in the economic health of the community, may also be
more amenable to taking part in innovative employment programs for residents (1999, pp.473-474).
Immigrant small business owners are often given a great deal of attention in this literature, as
groups who are able to capitalize on specialized "niche markets" within ethnic enclaves and on
networks of co-ethnics that provide access to capital and information. Researchers studying
entrepreneurship within ethnic communities disagree as to the benefits that accompany business
ownership, however: "some argue that small business can play an important role in promoting
upward mobility, whereas others see immigrant enterprise as confined to peripheral positions
offering only low returns and little potential for growth" (Waldinger, Aldrich, and Ward 1993,
p.14). This debate characterizes much of the controversy surrounding these programs. They
represent a means of providing access to alternative employment opportunities to groups with
few options, but these opportunities may be characterized by low earnings and mobility.
Workforce Development
Workforce development programs focus on moving local residents from low-wage jobs or
welfare into better paying jobs. Harrison and Weiss write that workforce development, often
narrowly defined as employment training and job referral, instead "consists of a constellation of
activities, from orientation to the work world, recruiting, placement, and mentoring to follow-up
counseling and crisis intervention" (1998, p.5). There is a different sense of local control
implicit in these strategies: control of monetary resources, skills, and prestige are enhanced by
moving community residents into better jobs.
A common criticism of these programs is that they often replace existing workers with program
participants, without improving overall employment opportunities. They may have some
potential to promote job creation and retention in an area, through developing a more highly
skilled local workforce or helping to retrain workers so that they can fill new skilled jobs created
within firms. To the extent that they are able to improve human capital and access to
employment networks among low-income residents, these programs remain an important
component of many community economic development strategies.
Improving existing low-wage jobs
A third strategy to improve access to economic opportunities in poor communities is to seek
changes in the rules, power structure, and compensation for jobs within low-wage labor markets.
This is a broad category of activities that could include union organizing, pressing for changes in
the funding and organization of a local training system, living wage campaigns, legislative
campaigns targeted at workplace issues, and some kinds of sectoral initiatives. Those who
pursue these strategies seek to transform jobs and the job market by improving wages for
traditionally low-paying jobs, helping to develop internal career ladders, or changing the laws
and regulations that impact the workplace. They are spearheaded by groups with diverse
agendas, from unions (who rarely locate themselves within the "community economic
development" movement) to community-based organizations (CBOs), and attempt to transform
the institutions that contribute to unequal employment outcomes. These institutional approaches
are more explicit than the other two approaches in ascribing preeminence to the power a group of
people holds over the quality of their jobs, their wages, and their working conditions.
Cooperative business development
Cooperative business development programs cut across these different categories, and claim to
accomplish the goals common to each. Local ownership of business, increased training
opportunities, and changes in the structure of and distribution of power within traditionally lowwage jobs are all outcomes these programs actively promote. Their proponents identify several
principles not always emphasized in the programs described above, that they believe are essential
to building a more just and sustainable local economy. These include participation in the making
of decisions that affect one's work and control over capital. I will examine the history and theory
that articulates why these principles of participation and control are important, and then explore
some of the trade-offs and ambiguities that may prevent this form of business ownership from
becoming the panacea it claims to be.
Cooperative business development
What is a worker-owned cooperative?
Worker ownership and cooperative ownership are not always the same thing; it is useful to
distinguish between the two. The most common ways to organize a worker-owned business are
worker cooperatives and Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). An ESOP is an employee
benefit plan that allows workers to share in company ownership and profits. The company
contributes stock to the trust outright, contributes cash to the trust to enable it to borrow money,
or has the trust borrow money with the stock and the company's guarantee as collateral. They
can also be organized so that worker shareholders have a voice in running the company, as
democratic ESOPs (ICA Group Basic Orientation, 1987, p.1). The majority of ESOPs, however,
are not managed by workers and have been used by businesses to raise money, to save taxes, or
to resist takeovers by other corporations (Krimerman and Lindenfield 1992, p.6).
In this paper, I focus on worker-owned cooperatives. As in ESOPs, the workers own the
company. Unlike most ESOPs, workers are responsible for managing their company. They
make decisions regarding significant matters democratically on a one-person, one-vote basis.
They also share the labor involved in running the enterprise, and the wages and other benefits
that result (GEO, "What is a Co-op?" 2001). Worker-owned cooperatives are said to differ from
other more mainstream businesses in that "those who do the work determine what the company
does, how the work is done, and what happens to the profits" (Jah-Shams, et al. 1996, p.2).
Those who write about cooperative ownership often highlight "seven basic principles of
cooperative ownership":
1. Voluntary and Open Membership - Cooperatives are voluntary organizations, open to all persons able to
use their services and willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, without gender, social, racial,
political or religious discrimination.
2. Democratic Member Control - Cooperatives are democratic organizations controlled by their members,
who actively participate in setting their policies and making decisions. Men and women serving as elected
representatives are accountable to the membership.
3. Member Economic Participation - Members contribute equitably to, and democratically control, the
capital of their cooperative. At least part of that capital is usually the common property of the cooperative.
They receive limited compensation, if any, on capital subscribed as a condition of membership.
4. Autonomy and Independence - Cooperatives are autonomous, self-help organizations controlled by their
members. If they enter into agreements with other organizations, including governments, or raise capital
from external sources, they do so on terms that ensure democratic control by their members and maintain
their cooperative autonomy.
5. Education, Training and Information - Cooperatives provide education and training for their members,
elected representatives, managers and employees so they can contribute effectively to the development of
their cooperatives. They inform the general public - particularly young people and opinion leaders about the nature and benefits of cooperation.
6. Cooperation among Cooperatives - Cooperatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the
cooperative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.
7. Concern for Community - While focusing on member needs, cooperatives work for the sustainable
development of their communities through policies accepted by their members. (NCBA 2001)
Not all of these principles are unique to cooperatives: voluntary and open membership, education
and training, and concern for community are certainly common to other businesses and
employment programs. However, these principles represent areas of belief and strategy that set
them apart from other workplaces and other employment programs: within the ideal cooperative
there are strong elements of choice, consent, participation, and democratic control that are more
equitably distributed than in the typical firm. These principles have developed over time as the
"cooperative movement", or really series of movements, has attempted to articulate just what it is
and what it is trying to achieve. It is useful to look briefly at the history of cooperatives to better
understand the context within which these ideas originated.
Cooperative history
Cooperative ownership is not a new idea; I have visited towns in Mexico where indigenous
communities have owned land and capital in common for hundreds of years. The use of this
form of ownership as an alternative to private ownership of enterprises is an idea grounded in a
more recent history of industrial development. It often emerged from organizing campaigns that
responded to changing and oppressive labor conditions. A grounding in this history helps to
understand past successes and failures, as well as the tradition in which current organizations that
initiate and support cooperatives place themselves.
The modern cooperative movement originated in early nineteenth century Europe. It was the
product of social movements and communitarian experiments which characterized this period
(Atwood and Baviskar 1995, p.6). Giese writes: "The first coops represented a peaceful attempt
to build an alternative, people-controlled system of goods distribution, an attempt which often
3
looked beyond that to an entirely people-controlled political economy" (1982, p. 15). In early
19th century Britain, industrialization began to transform the economic landscape of the nation,
and small farmers were forced from "the common lands" which were enclosed and claimed by
the wealthy. Within this context of deteriorating working conditions, in which workers were
increasingly concentrated into hierarchically organized factory settings, cooperative ownership of
productive enterprise emerged as an alternative. Polanyi describes the principle of the
"economic self-sufficiency of the laboring class", and "the linking of labor-notes, self-help, and
cooperation" which underlay Robert Owens's Villages of Co-operation (1944, p.106). The base
of these experiments, often regarded as utopian, was relief of the poor through their own
enterprise and initiative.
The history of cooperatives is closely tied to that of union organization: both responded in
different ways to industrialization, oppressive work conditions, and inequitable power relations
within the traditional workplace. At the end of an unsuccessful weavers' strike in 1843, "The
Equitable Society of Rochdale Pioneers" established a cooperative store, an undertaking based on
principles of democratic control, open and voluntary membership, and distribution of surplus
among the members in proportion to their transactions (Giese 1982, p. 3 17). Raiffeisen societies
were founded in Germany as the first credit cooperatives, basically operating as self-governing
associations of borrowers. Cooperatives of various types soon spread to other European
countries and other areas of the world (Atwood and Baviskar 1995, p.7).
The worker cooperative movement in the United States has a number of roots. The Patrons of
Husbandry, better known as the Grange, flourished after the Civil War. The Knights of Labor
(late 1800s) and the United Mine Workers of Illinois (1913-1923) established cooperative
enterprises which eventually failed, due in part to company opposition, intimidation, and arson.
Farmers and Iron Rangers started another wave of agricultural cooperatives in 1920s in the
Midwest, which met with varied levels of success (Giese 1982, pp.322-324).
In 1956, Louis Kelso helped initiate the first ESOP. He writes: "to avoid openly confronting a
deeply entrenched national economic policy committed to toil and welfare for the many and
capital ownership for the few, the first ESOP was introduced and steered through the various
regulatory agencies under the disguise of an employee benefit plan." (Kelso and Kelso 1991,
pp.52-53). As noted earlier, this form of worker ownership has not accomplished the lofty goals
its founder set for it. The activist movements of the1960s and 1970s led to the formation of
hundreds of worker- and consumer-run enterprises, including alternative schools, restaurants,
print shops, food co-operatives, legal collectives, health clinics, and local newspapers.
Legislation in the 1970s facilitated the establishment of thousands of ESOPs, and hundreds of
worker buy-outs occurred in the 1970s and 1980s to prevent plant shut-downs (Krimerman and
Lindenfeld 1992, p.5).
Today, all of these various cooperative strategies are still around in one form or another.
Consumer cooperatives, producer cooperatives, credit cooperatives, ESOPs, and worker-owned
cooperatives are all based on the principles developed during these experiments in collectively
owning and/or managing enterprises. I have focused on European and U.S. cooperatives, but
there is also quite an extensive literature describing and analyzing cooperatives in developing
countries (see Bianchi 1999, Damiani 1994, Baviskar and Attwood 1995).
The businesses that are the focus of this paper - small coops that provide alternative employment
opportunities for low-skilled workers - are not a prominent part of this history. This translates
into a dearth of strong examples of successful cooperatives that are part of economic
development programs in the inner city. The cleaning cooperatives that I will discuss shortly, as
well as landscaping cooperatives, cooperative associations of day laborers, home health care
cooperatives, and a slew of small restaurants and retail establishments, all remain a scattered set
of examples that draw upon some of the same support networks. The most visible exception is
Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) in the Bronx, a health-care company that currently
employs about 500 Latina and African American workers, with sales of $8 million (Jarusel 2000,
p.2). CHCA remains a well-studied island in a sea of the multiple small experiments that often
go unnoticed.
The limited visibility and scale of these coops is important to note before jumping into the
philosophical and theoretical justifications for cooperative ownership. If we conclude that,
theoretically, promoting this form of ownership is the best way to improve equity, efficiency,
quality of work experience, and community well-being, the next set of questions must deal with
the applicability of these principles to different kinds of cooperatives. The obstacles, trade-offs,
and contradictions that prevent these principles from being realized within different contexts and
sectors may temper the ideals they express.
Philosophical and theoretical justifications for cooperation
A well-developed set of theoretical and philosophical justifications underlie and have emerged
from this history of cooperative development. They seek to express why worker ownership is a
desirable, often preferable, way of organizing a business. I group the justifications given for
supporting cooperative ownership of business into four categories: equity, efficiency, quality of
work experience, and community orientation. These are similar to the goals of community
economic development, but are tied more closely to collective ownership and participation in
decision-making.
1. Equity
Economic democracy and participation
Most of the theorists I group under the heading "economic democracy and participation" are
liberal in their orientation, as they are primarily interested in how certain economic conditions
constrain the freedom of the individual. These theorists depart from the traditional liberal
perspective in that they are trying to understand how participation and control in the workplace not just market behavior and political participation - affect this freedom. Their point of
reference is the hierarchically governed enterprise, and they ascribe to it rigid and dampening
effects on equity in both the political and economic spheres of a society. Dahl writes that the
ownership and control of firms affects political inequality in 2 ways:
1) Ownership and control contribute to the creation of great differences among citizens in wealth,
income, status, skills, information, control over information and propaganda, access to
political leaders, and predictable life chances;
2) The internal governments of economic enterprises are flatly undemocratic - political equality
has been rejected by Americans as a proper principle of authority within firms. Hence the
ownership and control of enterprises creates enormous inequalities among citizens in
capacities and opportunities for participating in governing economic enterprises (1982, p.55).
Carol Pateman draws heavily on the insights of those writers she terms "theorists of participatory
democracy", including J.S. Mill and Rousseau, who believe participation is central to the
establishment and maintenance of a democratic polity. This polity is not just a set of national
representative institutions but a participatory society (1970, p.20). These theorists articulate the
importance of certain economic conditions, including economic equality and independence, for
such a participatory political system (p.22).
They attach a great deal of importance to the educative effects of participation in the workplace,
with in turn leads to repercussions in the political sphere. Rousseau discusses the
interrelationship between the authority structure of institutions and the psychological qualities
and attitudes of those within institutions: the experience of participation "attaches the individual
to his society and is instrumental in developing it into a true community" (Pateman 1970, p.27).
John Stuart Mill expands this hypothesis to cover industry: the individual could gain experience
in management of collective affairs in industry, just as in local government. He sees cooperative
forms of industrial organization leading to a "moral transformation" of those that take part in
them (Pateman 1970, p.34).
G.D.H. Cole also believed there could be no equality of political power without a substantive
measure of economic equality. He objected to the capitalist organization of industry, under
which labor was just another commodity, and the "humanity" of labor was denied. "Under a
participatory system, there would no longer be one group of 'managers' and one group of 'men',
the latter having no control over the affairs of the enterprise, but one group of equal decision
makers" (Pateman 1970, p.39). Pateman characterizes the "participatory model" that these
theorists lay out as "one where maximum input (participation) is required and where output
includes not just policies (decisions) but also the development of the social and political
capacities of each individual, so that there is 'feedback' from output to input" (1970, p.43).
Participation in the workplace thus has a broad range of positive effects on the individual effects that extend into the social and political spheres.
Marxist and socialist thought
Marx believed that equitable participation and democracy were irreconcilably at odds with the
capitalist means of production, which divides a society into two classes of owners and workers.
Control over the means of production by the bourgeoisie is the defining way of organizing an
economy under capitalism, and true democracy, participation, and cooperation will not come
about until the working class comes to see their interests as fundamentally opposed to those of
the capitalist class. Only after the revolution will workers be able to form a communistic and
cooperative society. Marx praised the cooperative factories of his day for representing "within
the old form the first sprouts of the new," but warned that they "naturally reproduce, and must
reproduce, everywhere in their actual organization all the shortcomings of the prevailing system"
(Capital, vol. 2 1967, p.338).
Indeed, contemporary unions, who use the rhetoric of class conflict when describing the
relationship between management and labor, often view cooperative ownership with suspicion: if
this relationship is at root a conflictual one, can the two functions really be united within
enterprises? The question of whether cooperatives can ever achieve the scale necessary to
"democratize" a capitalist economy has often been answered in the negative by Marxists.
There have been, of course, other socialist thinkers who believed cooperation could be achieved
within capitalism. Robert Owen, initiator of "The Villages of Cooperation" referred to above,
believed that "in spite of the machine, man should remain his own employer. The principle of
co-operation or "union" would solve the problem of the machine without sacrificing either
individual freedom or social solidarity (Polanyi, 1944, p.167). He also emphasized the educative
effects of cooperation and participation: "[The Villages of Cooperation's] activities were as
much educational and propagandist as commercial; their aim was the creation of the New Society
by their associated effort" (Polanyi 1944, p.168).
Conclusions
These theories of economic democracy and participation identify the roots of exploitation and
inequality in concentrated ownership within the economic sphere. They articulate a clear and
historically grounded vision of why collective ownership and control are important to achieving
equity within a society. No such clear vision characterizes discussions of equity in community
economic development. The questions that this discussion poses for an analysis of cooperatives
are: 1) How important is ownership to securing the benefits of participation within a firm, given
that there are other ways of participating in the making of decisions, including union
participation and forms of high performance work organization? 2) Can coops be successful
within an economic system that is decidedly uncooperative? 3) If they can be successful, will
cooperatives ever be able to reach a scale that extends the benefits of cooperation beyond
scattered experiments?
2. Productivity
Many proponents of cooperatives believe that participation and ownership contribute to
improved productivity, because worker-owners have more of an incentive to do a good job, and
to work together to solve problems. This idea resonates with popular theories of business
management that attribute productivity gains to adoption of High Performance Work
Organization strategies such as quality circles and team problem solving, and with the trend to
give employees an ownership stake in firms through stock options.
Of course, cooperative supporters argue that there is something special about the combination of
ownership and control particular to worker owned cooperatives. "A company cannot and must
not lose any of its efficiency just because human values are considered more important than
purely economic or material resources within that company; on the contrary, such a consideration
should help increase efficiency and quality" (Jose Marfa Aizmendiarrieta, in Morrison 1991,
p. 1 1 1). It seems like common sense - sure, quality and productivity should increase when people
are valued. They will work harder. They have more of an incentive to be productive. But can it
really be shown that cooperatives are more efficient than other types of firms?
A great deal of research has been done evaluating the effects of ownership and participation on
productivity, with most of the attention focused on traditional workplaces. Levine provides a
good overview of this body of research, which has consistently found productivity improvements
associated with implementation of participatory decision-making structures (1995, pp.2-6). He
points to several studies focused specifically on worker-owned cooperatives, which found that
participation raises productivity (p.52). Alperovitz and Faux cite a National Science Foundationfunded study in 1975 that determined that positive productivity changes resulted in 80 percent of
the workers' participation cases it studied (1982, p.360). These authors describe an
overwhelmingly positive contribution that participation makes to productivity. Other authors
studying cooperatives in developing countries argue that democratic decision-making structures
can impair efficiency and the ability to exploit economies of scale (Bianchi 1999, Lele 1981).
I suspect the "gains to productivity" from cooperation differs by sector, and certainly by the
structure of the cooperative. My experience with Eco-Cleaning indicates that there may be tradeoffs between participation and productivity, particularly when a firm is organized in a truly
democratic, participatory way. It is quite a time-intensive process to agree upon and implement
changes as a group. This raises two questions relevant to my study: 1) Does the structure of an
industry influence whether a cooperative within that industry is able to achieve productivity
gains? 2) How do differences in the structure and practice of decision-making within a
cooperative affect worker productivity?
3. Better work experiences
The idea of satisfying work is quite difficult to pin down. It is often closely tied to opportunities
for personal development and growth - generally associated with challenging and varied tasks
and responsibilities. The crucial factors that provide these opportunities in the cooperative model
are, again, control and participation. "While satisfying work remains essential for our wellbeing, it is available to fewer and fewer persons... the fundamental source of the problem, and its
potential solution, centers on the issue of control: control of the conditions of work, the kind and
variety of work done, the pace of work, and the product of work - in short, control over the
whole labor process" (Lindenfeld, 1982, p.1). "Self-governance and worker participation in
organizational decision-making are crucial ingredients in job satisfaction, motivation, work
performance, psychological growth and development of the worker" (Hammer et al. 1982, p.88).
The characteristics of cooperative ownership are thus believed to shape a more satisfying work
experience that involves personal and intellectual development rather than simply the repetition
of routine task. Ronco writes that knowledge tasks, such as planning, decision making, and
setting priorities, are generally handled by a few managers, while workers carry out execution
tasks. The hierarchical governance structure of the typical firm translates into a minimal sense of
involvement in the over-all work process (1980, p.15). Pateman and Dahl raise similar
arguments when calling for increased participation in the economic sphere. There is a shared
sense among these writers that divorcing decision-making power from workers damages the
satisfaction they derive from their job.
Again, it sounds great, but can they prove it? Studies of parallel structures such as quality circles
and problem-solving teams provide some evidence that participation helps to make work more
satisfying (Appelbaum and Batt 1994). Furthermore, Freeman and Rogers present survey
evidence that workers desire more opportunities to participate in decision-making within their
workplaces (1998).
This leaves several questions unanswered, however. Is there something special about
cooperative ownership that promotes psychological growth and development? Does the
cooperative approach really differ from other approaches to entrepreneurial development, or from
participatory management structures within traditional firms? And does this translate into
worker satisfaction and/or business success? As already discussed, there may be some loss of
productivity and profitability from allocating decision-making responsibility more
democratically. The possibility of a trade-off between creating satisfying work experiences and
organizing a company efficiently brings into sharp focus the need to evaluate the range and
extent of the benefits workers enjoy from a cooperative business development program.
4. Community orientation
Community orientation is probably the most difficult justification for cooperative business
development to discuss in a coherent manner. Yet it is often held up as a central "good" that
cooperatives provide. This focus on community looks beyond the benefits that accrue to the
workers or the firm, and describes some greater set of benefits thought to percolate through the
neighborhood, city, or region in which the cooperative is located. Authors cite greater sensitivity
by coops to issues such as environmental pollution that are likely to affect local people, and their
devotion of surplus profits to providing community benefits such as day-care centers and
educational programs (Krimerman and Lindenfeld 1982, p.5).
The belief that cooperatives will have a stronger community orientation than other kinds of firms
is based on the assumption that if those who own and control an enterprise both live and work in
a place, they will be more responsive to the needs of others in that place. Again, this is not a
foregone conclusion, and is practically impossible to incorporate into an analysis of small,
marginally profitable cleaning businesses. Studies that place a heavy emphasis on this
community orientation tend to focus on places where a strong network of cooperatives play a
prominent role in the economic life of a place, such as the Evangeline region of Prince Edward
Island, Canada (Wilkinson and Quarter 1996) and Mondragon, Spain (Morrison 1991).
Conclusions
Equity, productivity, quality of work experience, and community orientation are all held up as
advantages cooperatives have over other forms of business organization. Each of these professed
advantages is, however, contested on several fronts. Equity may entail some loss of efficiency, a
classic but controversial trade-off. Quality of work experience may likewise be tied to more
equitable distribution of decision-making power, which in turn may limit the possibility of
achieving economies of scale. A strong orientation toward community needs may be difficult for
a small cooperative with limited resources. These debates over the advantages of cooperatives
are not easily resolved. They will continue to run through my analysis of the successes and
potential of a cooperative that was founded with these goals in mind, and that continues to
struggle to achieve them.
Conclusions from the literature
This discussion of the history of cooperatives and the justifications for supporting this form of
ownership provides a base for my analysis of whether and how cleaning cooperatives improve
employment outcomes for their members. I have laid out the outcomes and strategies that
interest proponents of community economic development, and what cooperative ownership
contributes to them. Participation and control in the workplace figure most prominently as
catalysts for a range of positive employment and community effects. In the following chapters, I
draw on these insights, and the questions they raise, to evaluate whether cooperative ownership
holds promise as a strategy to improve employment outcomes for immigrants in a low-wage
industry. By focusing more narrowly on cleaning and the people who do it, I hope to understand
how their work, their attitudes, and their opportunities are shaped by the way participation and
ownership are organized within the work place.
Chapter 2
Methodology
I began this research project with a series of questions: What criteria should be used to evaluate
employment outcomes from a community economic development strategy? Can cooperative
ownership of cleaning firms can help to bring about these desirable outcomes? Are there lessons
from other firms in the cleaning industry that may help to guide cooperative business
development efforts? I have begun to answer the first of these two questions by looking at how
academics and practitioners define the goals of community economic development. I have
discussed where these goals overlap with those of cooperative business development, and what
supporters of coops say is unique about cooperative ownership. The next task is to evaluate how
applicable these claims are to cooperative ownership in a particular industry.
To do this, I compare four different kinds of work arrangements within the house and office
cleaning industries. These include: 1) a cooperative house and office cleaning company (Ecocleaning); 2) a unionized office cleaning company (Service Cleaning); 3) a non-unionized maid
service company (Maids, Inc.); and 4) an independent housecleaner (Alicia).' The four differ in
their client base: unionized firms almost exclusively clean offices, both maid service firms and
independents clean houses, and cooperatives clean both houses and offices. This difference in
their target markets means that business strategy and organization of work will naturally differ
among the firms. I have chosen these work arrangements to study, however, because they
represent a range of business strategies and employment options within cleaning. Cleaning
cooperatives usually target a mix of both kinds of clients, and many of the worker-members at
Green Cleaning have worked in or continue to work in environments that correspond to these
other three categories. When a CBO seeks to focus its economic development activities on
improving jobs in the cleaning sector, the alternatives for cleaning workers fall somewhere along
this spectrum.
The specific employment outcomes that serve as the basis of my comparison include wages and
benefits, opportunities for training and advancement, control (over the organization of work and
the administration of the firm), and job satisfaction. I seek to understand whether there are
discernible differences among the four kinds of work arrangement in the benefits the workers get
from their jobs and how their work is structured. I am also interested in understanding whether
the characteristics or background that cleaning workers bring to their jobs influence the
importance they place on certain of these outcomes. A comparison among these different work
environments will help to understand whether cooperatives are really a better employment
option, and if so, why. The stories cleaning workers tell about their own motivation and
background begin to explain why they choose or end up in certain work environments.
After discussing employment outcomes, I evaluate business success in each case, focusing on
how the strategies the company (or individual) pursues translate into successes and failures.
Coops may provide great jobs, but fail to represent a particularly efficient way of organizing a
1I
use pseudonyms for the cleaning companies, the managers, and the workers to protect their confidentiality
cleaning business. The experiences of other cleaning businesses point to ways in which coops
can improve their competitiveness within the limits their structure sets.
Research Strategy
1. Case Studies
In each of the three cleaning companies described above, I interviewed one to two individuals in
a management position, and three to five workers. One interview with the independent house
cleaner forms the bulk of the fourth case study. Beyond these interviews, the strategy I used to
understand how each business operates and how decisions are made differs.
* Eco-cleaning: At Eco-cleaning, I interviewed the manager and all five cooperative members.
My analysis of the cleaning cooperative also incorporates my experience facilitating a seven
month evaluation of the business, during which time I met with the members every other
week to discuss business structure, strategies, and goals. I also have attended several
meetings of the cooperative since the completion of the evaluation, and am on the Ecocleaning Board of Directors which meets several times a year.
" Maids, Inc.: At Maids, Inc. I interviewed the owner of the franchise, the manager, and four
workers. To understand the structure of the company and of the work process at this house
cleaning franchise, I first spent a morning watching videos that gave detailed instructions
about their cleaning procedures and customer service expectations. One of these videos was
intended for the managers of Maids, Inc. franchises, and conveyed strategies for recruiting,
training, and keeping good employees. I also worked for a day with a Maids, Inc. team,
which was spent driving from house to house, dusting and chatting with the two women
about their lives and work experiences.
" Service Cleaning: At Service Cleaning, I interviewed the Vice President, the marketing
director, and two workers, one of whom was a shop steward. I also spoke with the business
agent at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) who represents the workers at
this firm.
" Alicia: To understand independent cleaning work, I interviewed Alicia, a Brazilian woman
who cleans houses for a number of different clients.
I used these different strategies in each case primarily due to differences in access. I have had a
great deal of experience with Eco-cleaning because of my position as an intern for their sponsor
organization. I was lucky enough to get in contact with someone at a Maids, Inc. franchise who
went out of her way to help me gather the information I requested. The Vice President I
interviewed at Service Cleaning was extremely helpful, giving me three hours of his time and
explaining all of the details of janitorial work from the management's perspective. However, he
was unwilling to put me in contact with his employees, and could not allow me to visit a
workplace due to security considerations. The independent housecleaner explained what she
does in her job, but my understanding of her work is limited to one conversation. In each case, I
did what I could to understand the differences and similarities among the work environments,
and believe I was successful in gathering comparable information in each case.
2. Supporting evidence
The four case studies help me to describe some of the differences among work environments in
the Boston cleaning industry from my own perspective and from the perspectives of workers and
managers. However, I was aware going into this project that the case study approach has some
weaknesses. The most common of these is the difficulty of generalizing findings. As I tried to
interpret the results from these interviews and from my experiences meeting and cleaning with
these workers, I questioned the "representativeness" of my small sample. How do I know these
are not exceptional cases? Are these firms typical of others in their industry? How applicable
are my findings to other cooperative cleaning businesses?
To answer these questions, and to understood how each of my cases fit into the greater whole of
which they are a part, I took another series of steps. I interviewed individuals who work or have
worked with nine different cleaning cooperatives, most of which are located in the Los Angeles
or San Francisco areas. Those interviewed include two worker/owners, two managers, and three
staff members at the non-profits that helped start the coops. One of these staff members has
worked with three of the cooperatives.
The coops include Manos Janitorial Cooperative, Heaven Sent Housecleaners, Non-toxic
Professional Housecleaners, Emma's Eco-Clean, Placerville Coop, Pueblo Nuevo Enterprises,
Dynamic Workers, Restif Cleaning Services, and Always Ready. All of these are located in
California. I was unable to interview anyone connected with the two other cleaning coops I was
able to find, Mora Basa Cooperative Cleaning Community in Boston and Unity Housecleaners
in New York. I also rely on written materials produced by the cooperatives and by student
groups and academics writing about them to understand their different structures and histories.
This portion of my research was helpful in identifying common areas of weakness and possible
innovations for dealing with these weaknesses among cooperatives similar to Eco-cleaning.
To better understand the experiences of workers in other maid service companies, I rely heavily
on an article by Barbara Ehrenreich which details her experiences working for one such
company, and provides background information on the industry. Each of these companies has a
web site with useful facts about its structure and market, which serves as a basis for comparison.
I also spoke with someone at the Maids, Inc. corporate office who gave me information about
starting a franchise.
A majority of large janitorial firms in Boston are unionized, and so there is doubtless a good deal
of variation among these firms and the experiences of their workers. Interviews with two
business representatives from SEIU Local 254 helped me to understand the union's strategies for
organizing cleaning workers, their relationships with management at the different companies, and
variation among these companies. Karen Lado's 1994 M.C.P. thesis in the Department of Urban
Studies and Planning at M.I.T. contains a wealth of information on unionized cleaning firms in
Boston gained through interviews with Central American workers in these firms, representatives
of cleaning companies, representatives of real estate management companies, union officials,
community activists, and staff members at social service agencies.
In addition, I interviewed four Latino(a) employees who work at different unionized cleaning
firms in Boston. I met these four individuals at introductory level ESL classes. Most of the coop
members and two of the workers at Maids, Inc. I interviewed have part-time jobs at unionized
firms, and discussed their experiences at these different jobs with me.
The most difficult of my case studies to support with additional research was the independent
housecleaner. These workers are usually hired through networks, and I do not have an easy way
to get access to these networks. I interviewed one other independent worker who lives in my
neighborhood. I was able to get some information about independent cleaning workers in Boston
through an interview with the director of the Immigrant Workers Resource Center (IWRC). I
also draw on several anthropological studies of domestic workers that detail the experiences of
independent housecleaners in different U.S. cities (Romero 1992, Salzinger 1991) to understand
the salary range and experiences of these cleaning workers.
Description of methods
In total, I interviewed:
17 cleaning workers
e
5 individuals in management positions within the cleaning firms
e
e
2 SEIU staff members
1 director of a non-profit that helps to organize and educate cleaning workers
e
7 representatives of other cooperative cleaning businesses
e
Each interview lasted between one and three hours, and consisted of a series of closed and open
ended questions. I took detailed notes during the interviews and typed the responses given by
interviewees afterwards. Interviews with the workers were almost all conducted in Spanish and
in their homes. They were generally accompanied by coffee, snacks, and conversation about our
respective lives, families, and plans for the future. Interviews with management, union staff, and
non-profit staff were conducted in their offices and in English. Interviews with the
representatives of other cooperative cleaning businesses were conducted over the phone. One of
these was conducted in Spanish, the rest in English.
Weaknesses
There are several weaknesses in the research strategy I have chosen that are important to
highlight. First, as mentioned earlier the case study approach is characterized by a relatively
small sample in a particular location, hence it is difficult to generalize my findings to all cleaning
workers in these different work environments. I have tried to address this concern by relying on
additional interviews and sources of information outside of my four cases.
A second potential weakness is the way my sample was selected. My interviewees and cases
were not randomly chosen, hence they may not be representative of the range of experiences in
these industries. I interviewed all of the Eco-cleaning worker-owners, and Alicia is the only
person in her one-woman business, so I can state with confidence that their opinions represent
their respective businesses. I was unable to get anything like this sample of workers from the
other two cleaning firms. The Maids, Inc. team with whom I worked and the other Maids team
that I interviewed may also not be representative of workers within this firm, as I was directed
towards them by the owner and manager. Workers at Service Cleaning were referred to me by
union representatives, and so were either active in the union or had filed a complaint against the
company. Other unionized workers I found through introductory level ESL classes, and thus
were more likely to be recent arrivals and to possess some drive to move out of their cleaning
jobs. Each of my cases was likewise chosen based on referrals and ease of access.
A final weakness may be the inconsistency in the research strategy I use in each case study, also
mentioned earlier. Due to differences of access in each case, I have a great deal of information
and knowledge about Eco-cleaning, a little less about Maids, Inc., still less about Service
Cleaning, and very little about Alicia. However, had I used a more rigidly consistent set of
research methods, I would not have been able to take advantage of the different resources
available. The steps I took in each case give me a fairly good basis for making comparisons, and
allowed me to use a range of methods to construct this basis.
In spite of these possible weaknesses, I believe that I have pieced together an interesting and
informed picture of what work is like and how cleaning is managed in each of these four cases. I
have gotten my hands dirty (or at least dusty) in search of answers to what motivates cleaning
workers, how they feel about their jobs, and what opportunities for training and advancement
they feel are available to them. I have observed the frustration and commitment of a group of
cooperative worker-owners, and have sought to understand through the stories they tell me about
their lives and work experiences whether cooperative ownership offers them a different and
better form of employment. Extensive background research and interviews support these
findings, and provide a strong basis for offering recommendations to policy makers, non-profits,
and unions interested in improving employment outcomes for cleaning workers.
The real test of the applicability and generalizability of my findings will perhaps be how useful
they are to the people for whom these recommendations are written. This thesis is most basically
a reflection on and analysis of a particular community development strategy. The methods I have
chosen are thus intended first and foremost to scratch beneath the surface of statements like,
"cooperative ownership of businesses promotes a more sustainable and just economy" to
understand what this form of ownership means to the workers and what practices allow such a
business to be sustainable. Why should we care about who owns an enterprise and participates in
its management? The answer lies somewhere within the experiences of these Latino and Latina
cleaning workers.
Chapter 3
The cleaning industry and cleaning work
Cooperative cleaning businesses are created for different reasons. Non-profit organizations may
sponsor a coop in order to achieve a range of community development goals. Cleaning workers
may form a coop to receive higher wages or to find more work. Despite these differences,
cleaning cooperatives share a common commitment both to providing better employment for
their members and to building a profitable and sustainable businesses. Before jumping into my
analysis of whether one such coop has been successful in achieving these goals, I will briefly
describe the industry of which it is a part. This provides a background for understanding why
cleaning is an important sector to target if one is interested in improving employment outcomes
for low-wage, low-skilled immigrant workers.
The cleaning industry contains within it multiple categories of work. The statistical and
descriptive information I use comes from both the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Bureau
2
of the Census, which use several different, and often overlapping systems of classification. I use
the Economic Census system, which divides the industry into "non-residential cleaning" and
"residential cleaning". This draws a useful distinction between work performed in commercial
establishments, offices, or institutions and work performed in private residences.
Non-residential cleaning
What is it and who does it?
Non-residential cleaning includes all paid cleaning work that is not done in the home. This
includes janitorial work, as well as cleaning work performed by housekeeping staff in hotels,
hospitals, nursing homes, and universities. In 1998, 3.3 million janitors and cleaners were
employed in the U.S., less than 5% of whom were self-employed. Median annual earnings were
$15,340, with the middle 50 percent earning between $12,560 and $19,110. Wages vary widely
within this industry: the lowest 10 percent earned less than $11,620 and the highest 10 percent
earned more than $25,060 (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, 1999).3
2 The Bureau of Labor Statistics recognizes two separate categories of cleaning work in their Occupational
Employment Statistics: 1) Janitors and Cleaners, Except Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners and 2) Maids and
Housekeeping Cleaners. The basis they use for this distinction appears to be whether workers are performing
"heavy" cleaning duties (cleaning floors, shampooing rugs, washing walls and glass, and removing rubbish), or "light
cleaning duties" (making beds, replenishing linens, cleaning rooms and halls, and vacuuming) (BLS, OES 1999). I
feel this does not capture a meaningful distinction between cleaning work done in houses and in offices or
institutions. They use a different division within their Occupational Outlook Handbook: 1) Janitors and Cleaners and
Institutional Cleaning Supervisors, and 2) Private Household Workers. This captures the house/office distinction,
but excludes professional house cleaning services. The Economic Census uses yet another system, distinguishing
between nonresidential building cleaning (NAICS 56172-3701) and residential cleaning (NAICS 56172-3702).
3 Figures from the OES's 1999 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates reports different numbers
for "Janitors and Cleaners, Except Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners": 2,090,560 janitors and cleaners were
employed in the U.S., with a mean hourly wage of $8.76 and a mean annual wage of $18,220. Wage variation within
The 1997 economic census reports 48,297 establishments in nonresidential building cleaning,
with $17.8 billion in receipts, or an average of $370,000 in sales for each establishment. There is
great variation in the size and sophistication of these businesses, as well as the markets they
serve. Individual offices and small buildings may employ a "mom and pop" cleaner (as one
cleaning service manager noted, "all you need is a bucket and a mop to start a business in this
industry"). Larger office buildings, institutions, and commercial clients generally rely on larger,
more established cleaning companies.
The economic census reports establishment size and information only for janitorial services,
which includes both non-residential and residential services. This data does show a clear trend,
with number of establishments steadily decreasing with size and sales steadily increasing with
size. In 1997, there were 19,242 establishments with one to four employees, which together
account for $1.9 billion in receipts, or an average of around $99,000 each. The 1,399
establishments with 100 employees or more account for $8.8 billion in receipts, or around $6.3
million in average sales per establishment. This tells the same story told by the Vice President of
Service Cleaning and SEIU representatives: several large companies usually compete for the
larger office buildings and institutional contracts, while smaller establishments handle the
smaller and less lucrative contracts.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics gives a brief summary of what nonresidential cleaning work
entails in their Occupational Outlook Handbook. Nonresidential cleaners work in office
buildings, hospitals, stores, apartment houses, hotels, and other types of buildings. Janitors may
mop floors, clean bathrooms, vacuum carpets, dust furniture, and make minor repairs.
Housekeepers or maids may make beds, change linens, clean rooms and halls, and vacuum. No
special education is required, but beginners "should know simple arithmetic and be able to
follow instructions." Most janitors and cleaners learn the necessary skills on the job. (BLS 1999)
This lays out what most of us probably already understand about the work done by janitors and
cleaners: it is hard, messy, and does not require a great deal (if any) prior education. Little has
changed about these facts over the years; however, the structure of ownership, management, and
unionization of cleaning work have undergone some major changes that have influenced
compensation, job security, and the organization of work.
Change over time
Non-residential cleaning is today dominated by contract cleaning services, which are hired by
property managers or building owners to coordinate every step in the cleaning process. This was
not always the case. Until the late 1960s and early 1970s, most routine cleaning in corporate and
commercial office buildings was taken care of by in-house janitorial staff, many of whom were
full-time employees with full benefits. In the late 1960s, building owners began to contract out
the management of buildings to professional real estate management companies, who then
subcontracted cleaning and security services to other companies. Some owners retained in-house
property management, but most joined the shift to contract cleaning services. (Lado 1994, p.19)
this sector is significant, ranging from under $5.79 an hour for the bottom 10% to over $13.44 an hour for the top
10% of wage earners (BLS 1999 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates).
These new arrangements were prompted primarily by a shift in ownership mix, as local owners
of commercial real estate were replaced by national or international investors. These new owners
found it more efficient to purchase cleaning services from a specialized vendor (Waldinger et al.
1998, p.104). Contract cleaning companies were able to offer significant cost savings, as they
specialized in hiring, training, and supervising staff and often paid lower wages with fewer
benefits. Commercial office buildings were the first to make this shift, but corporations and
educational institutions have increasingly followed the trend toward hiring these contract
cleaning companies (Lado 1994, p.19).
The union presence in cleaning work has also changed over the years. The Building Service
Employees International Union (BSEIU) was founded in Chicago in 1920 by primarily first- and
second-generation building service workers. In the 1930s, it spread beyond Chicago, to New
York, Los Angeles, and other major cities, where newly established locals recruited the in-house
janitors that predominated at that time. The shift to contract cleaning initially had a negative
effect on union membership, but in most cities the union was able to organize the new firms.
In the 1980s, after several decades of union growth, SEIU began to lose janitorial membership.
The severe recession of the early 1980s placed the unionized part of the industry under cost
pressure, and non-union firms gained a foot hold in many parts of the country (Waldinger et al.
1998, pp.104-105). The extent and nature of the decline differed by city. In Boston, New York,
Chicago, and San Francisco, janitorial and cleaning work remains highly unionized, particularly
in central business districts. Los Angeles suffered a huge decline in janitorial union membership,
falling from a peak of 5,000 in 1978 to a low of 1,800 in 1985 (Fisk et al. 2000, p.200).
These changes have had different effects on cleaning workers in different parts of the country,
due in part to variation in unionization rates and in real estate market conditions. Non-residential
cleaning is a highly competitive business with, as noted earlier, a variety of differently sized
cleaning firms, all seeking to expand their share of the market. Lado quotes a property manager
in Boston who affirms this point: "the supply of properties to be cleaned is finite but the supply
of cleaning companies is infinitely elastic" (1994, p. 22). The nature and intensity of this
competition in non-residential cleaning creates a difficult environment for unions trying to
organize within the industry and cooperatives trying to compete within it.
Residential cleaning
What is it and who does it?
A second category of cleaning work is residential cleaning. Residential cleaning is generally done
by either cleaning service businesses or freelancers, otherwise known as "independents". In
1997, the Economic Census reports, there were 20,765 residential cleaning service
establishments, with receipts of $1.8 billion, or an average of $87,000 for each firm. Corporate
4
cleaning services control 25 to 30 percent of this market (Ehrenreich 2000, p.64). These
4 Ehrenreich reports that "Corporate cleaning services now control 25 to 30 percent of the $1.4 billion housecleaning
business". She gives no source for this information, but her figure is four million dollars less than that given by the
Economic Census.
businesses are almost exclusively franchise operations, with a network of franchises
independently owned and operated who pay a "franchise fee" to a national office. The Maids
International, Molly Maids, Merry Maids, Mini Maids, and Maid Brigade are becoming
household names, with numerous establishments throughout the United States and the world.
Other businesses are independently owned and operated, but the majority of the growth within
this industry is concentrated in the corporate sector (Ehrenreich 2000, p.64). Wages vary;
Ehrenreich reports that in Portland, Maine the hourly wage at these firms (including the unpaid
time driving between houses) came out to around $6 to $6.63 an hour (2000, p. 65). This wage
may be slightly greater in larger cities: in Boston it is closer to $7 to $8 an hour.
Despite this growth in corporate house cleaning, the great majority of paid housekeepers are
independents. Most of these jobs go unreported, so it is difficult to estimate just how many
people work in the sector. The census reports 549,000 domestic workers in 1998, up 9 percent
since 1996 - a number that is certainly an underestimate. Of the "private household cleaners and
servants" it was able to record in 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 46.8 percent
were Hispanic, 15.8 percent black, and 2.7 percent "other" (Ehrenrich, 2000, p.63). Earnings
vary widely, from $10 an hour or more in a big city to less than the minimum wage. Median
weekly earnings were reported as $235 per week, but experienced workers employed by wealthy
families may earn $800 to $1,200 a week (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, 1999). This
paints a picture of a household cleaning sector with significant earnings variation in which
minorities, especially Hispanic immigrants, are disproportionately represented.
Change over time
Residential cleaning in the United States has consistently been the province of minority and
immigrant women. The composition of the labor force has fluctuated within these parameters,
however. Mary Romero, in her book Maid in the U.S.A. compiles a history of how household
labor has changed over time. Poor indentured servants and African slaves during the colonial
period; Irish, German, and Chinese immigrants in the mid-1800s to the early 1900s; and black
women who migrated to the North and those who remained in the South following the Civil War
all worked disproportionately as household workers prior to World War II. The labor market in
the Southwest had a somewhat different composition, with Mexican women holding a majority
of these jobs after annexation.
In the decades following World War II, the American middle class expanded, moved into smaller
homes, and relied more heavily on labor-saving technology, all of which contributed to decreased
reliance on paid household labor. At the same time, the number of household workers began to
decline as new kinds of job opportunities were opened to women. Fewer of these opportunities
opened for African American women or Chicanas, who remained over-represented in domestic
service. In the 1980s and 1990s, "the composition of the domestic labor force has shifted from
native- to foreign-born women of color". Today, immigrant women from "third world"
countries, in regions such as Central and South America, the Caribbean, South Asia, are the most
rapidly growing source of new labor for household work (Romero 1992, pp. 7 1-87).
There has been a recent surge in demand for housecleaners. In 1999, between 14 and 18 percent
of households employed an outsider to do the cleaning, and the numbers have been rising.
Mediamark Research reports a 53 percent increase between 1995 and 1999 in the number of
households using a hired cleaner or service once a month or more, and Maritz Marketing finds
that 30 percent of the people who hired help in 1999 did so for the first time (Ehrenreich 2000,
p.62). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that for many years, demand for household help has
outstripped the supply of workers willing to take domestic jobs; an imbalance expected to persist
and possibly worsen. This limited supply has prompted many households to turn to domestic
cleaning firms or "maid service companies" to meet their needs (BLS Occupational Outlook
Handbook, "Private Household Workers").
Molly Maid, one of these maid service companies, plugs franchise opportunities in their
company with the following statistics:
Today's busy families are on the go and need help with their housework. That's why the U.S. Department
of Commerce estimates that 80% of dual-income households will use a residential cleaning service by the
year 2000. As a result, residential housecleaning has become one of the fastest growing industries in the
country. It's currently approaching $20 billion dollars in annual sales, and the projected annual growth
rate is 20%. During 1998, MOLLY MAID owners enjoyed an average growth rate of 22%. The U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics says that "Cleaning services are expected to be the second biggest generator of
new jobs for the period 1994-2005." This is truly a rock solid industry, with consumer demand estimated
to continue increasing through the next five years. (Molly Maid, www.mollymaid.com)
Other corporate cleaning companies echo this optimism, reporting growth rates between 20 and
25 percent a year (Ehrenreich 2000, p.65).
Residential cleaning has changed its complexion and structure over the years. The shift toward
an increased reliance on cleaning service companies has been accompanied by a decrease in the
more personal relationships between homeowner and employee that once characterized this
industry, where wages are individually negotiated and wages and working conditions highly
uneven. Like non-residential cleaning, it has remained a low-paid, low-status job for the
majority of its workers. I will now briefly outline some of the major problems workers face in
both of these cleaning sectors, and the strategies workers, unions, and non-profit organizations
are using to address these problems.
Problems faced by workers
The non-residential and residential cleaning industries are important targets for efforts to
improve employment outcomes for low-wage workers. They are characterized by limited
opportunities for advancement and strong pressures towards low wages and benefits. There is a
great deal of overlap in who works in these industries and the problems they face in their jobs.
Although residential work tends to have a greater proportion of women than non-residential
work, in Boston (and probably in other parts of the country) many immigrants move between the
two, often holding down a day job cleaning houses and an evening job cleaning offices.
The bulk of work in the non-residential cleaning industry is labor intensive and low-skilled. This
means that there is potentially a large supply of workers, particularly during periods when there is
a surplus of low-skilled labor, competing for jobs. It also means that contract cleaning firms that
are able to pay lower wages are easily able to undercut their competition. These firms do not
compete exclusively on the basis of price; union representatives and the manager of Service
Cleaning noted that quality, size, and market share were also factors a potential customer weighs
heavily when evaluating bids. Fisk et al. write that the issue of trust is central to building owners
and managers, who may be wary of giving access to their building over to a little known mom
and pop establishment. This has contributed to a concentration of employment in a few major
firms in most cities (2000, p.204).
The ability to cut labor costs is, however, an important factor in a firm's success at securing
contracts, particularly during a weak local real estate market. This was true in Boston during the
recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when falling profit margins in the commercial real
estate market intensified pressures on cleaning companies to offer more services for less (Lado
1994, p.21). The high degree of price competition and ease of entry within the industry means
that there always exist alongside established, unionized firms that follow fair labor practices a
number of cleaning firms that pay the minimum wage or below, hire workers off the books, and
offer few if any benefits. Contracts between building owners or managers and cleaning service
contractors permit short termination notice, typically thirty days. Thus union members can lose
their jobs with little warning if a building owner switches from a union to a nonunion cleaning
service (Fisk et al. 2000, pp.201-202).
Residential cleaning workers also must deal with low wages and benefits, but they face a
different range of problems due to the dispersed and often unregulated nature of the work.
Cleaning workers employed by maid service companies enjoy stable employment, relatively
consistent expectations by clients, and some benefits, though wages remain low (Ehrenreich
2000). An independent household worker, however, is employed by a family and works in their
home - a relationship which brings with it a variety of working conditions and wage scales, as
well as a certain instability of expectations (Romero 1992, Salzinger 1991).
Another problem these workers face is a dearth of opportunities for advancement. In large nonresidential cleaning firms, cleaners may be promoted to supervisor or to a management position.
There are far fewer of these positions than there are workers, however - one manager quoted a
ratio of one supervisor for every 20 workers - and poor English skills within the immigrant work
force act as a barrier to promotion. This was confirmed by the members of management and the
cleaning workers I interviewed: for the majority of janitorial and cleaning staff, it is unlikely that
their current job will lead to a more high-skilled, better-paid job. Workers in maid service
companies face similar problems advancing within the firms that employ them, and independent
cleaners encounter virtually no such opportunities.
Campaigns and strategies to improve cleaning work
Problems of low pay and limited advancement opportunities are not unique to cleaning work.
The size of the non-residential and residential cleaning industries and their visible presence as
employers of large numbers of low-wage workers, however, make them an important target for
programs and campaigns that seek to improve employment outcomes in the lower tiers of the
labor market.
Union strategies
Unions, such as Service Employees International Union (SEIUT) and the Hotel Employees and
Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), are the most visible advocates for and
organizers of non-residential cleaners. These unions try to organize a substantial portion of the
industry in order to take wages for janitorial and cleaning work out of competition, and act as
intermediaries to ensure that fair labor practices are enforced. Unions prosecute employers who
violate labor laws, educate workers on their rights, negotiate with union signatories to set wages
and benefits, and organize non-union workplaces. They have also worked with other
organizations on campaigns that seek broader changes in legislation and policy that affect
cleaning workers. One such example is the living wage campaigns that have often grown out of
collaboration with ACORN and Industrial Areas Foundation affiliates.
The most extensively reported of recent union efforts to improve wages, benefits, and working
conditions for janitorial cleaners is SEIU's "Justice for Janitors (JfJ)" campaign. In the mid1980s, the national SEIU began to focus organizing efforts on building services, developing a set
of tactics that came to be known as Justice for Janitors (Fisk et al. 2000, p.203). The JfJ
campaigns in Los Angeles, initiated in 1988, have received a great deal of press for their "noisy,
rambunctious, disruptive - and successful - efforts both to organize and win raises for workers at
or near the bottom of the economy" (Meyerson 2000, p.25). SEIU set out to organize Los
Angeles janitors and persuade building contractors to recognize the union, and succeeded in
raising unionization rates, wages and benefits, as well as forcing into the public view the daily
struggles faced by low-wage workers (Meyerson 2000, p.26). The pressure SEIU is able to bring
to bear on contract cleaning companies and building owners thus remains a central part of efforts
to improve outcomes for cleaning workers in many parts of the country.
Community based strategies
Unions are not a visible presence in the residential cleaning industry. Romero makes reference to
a long history of failed attempts to organize maid's unions (1991, p.161). There are, however, a
number of non-profit organizations that are committed to improving working conditions and
compensation for both residential and non-residential cleaning workers. Worker centers,
churches, and CBOs all provide services to low-wage workers and assist with campaigns to bring
about changes in government policy and employer practices. Most of these organizations are
based in the communities in which these workers live. Unlike unions, they focus their efforts on
a particular population of low-wage workers, such as those located in a geographic area or from
an ethnic group, rather than on a particular workplace or industry.
Immigrant worker centers are interesting hybrids in this community-based schema, as actors in
the struggle for immigrant worker rights that in most cases operate outside of the labor
movement (Fine 1997, p.16). Immigrant worker centers offer legal assistance, act as
intermediaries, and mount organizing campaigns to reform legal rights and protections in the
workplace. These centers, which can be found in places as diverse as Texas, Florida, New York,
California, Virginia, North Carolina, and Massachusetts, "focus on calling attention to and
changing the conditions under which immigrants work, through collective action" (Fine 1997,
p.16).
One such center is the Workplace Project in Hempstead, New York. Their staff and volunteers
regularly assist immigrants with employment related problems, and have organized a number of
successful campaigns to improve working conditions more generally. They won a contracting
site for day laborers; led and won a campaign to raise penalties by 800 percent against New York
State employers who pay less than the minimum wage; recovered more than $435,000 in back
pay for hundreds of workers; and raised wages for 200 day laborers by over 30 percent, among
other victories. Many of these efforts have been focused on improving conditions for residential
cleaning workers, including the establishment of a cooperative cleaning business, UNITY
Housecleaners (National Organizers Alliance 1998).
The Immigrant Workers Resource Center (IWRC) in Boston makes a similar commitment to
organizing and educating immigrant workers. They teach ESL classes and run a Women's
Leadership Training program that educates immigrant women about their rights, health and
safety issues, and how to organize workers in their community and workplaces. They also
sponsor a Workers' Council that is taking part in a campaign to obtain federal legislation
providing a general amnesty for undocumented immigrant workers. IWRC has collaborated with
SEIU and HERE on organizing campaigns, but like most worker centers has no direct affiliation
with local unions.
These various campaigns and strategies all seek improved wages, benefits, and working
conditions for cleaning workers. One of the most striking differences between the union
approach and the community based approach is the context in which they organize and serve
workers. While unions derive their strength from organizing an industry, community based
initiatives make a valuable contribution to organizing the traditionally difficult to organize in the
places they live. Residential cleaners are a prominent population among these hard-to-organize
workers. Indeed, most of the cleaning cooperatives I include in this study grew out of the efforts
of these organizations to help cleaning workers gain greater autonomy, better wages, and
improved working conditions.
Conclusions
Non-residential and residential cleaning work clearly have different characteristics. The
organization of the two industries, and the history of how they have changed over time, mark
them as separate spheres. However, the problems of low wages, low status, and limited
opportunities for advancement are common to both, as are the characteristics of the workers who
wind up in these jobs. Cleaning cooperatives represent an effort to improve outcomes for
cleaning workers that crosses the boundaries between the two categories of work. Understanding
whether these cooperatives have achieved notable success in addressing the problems workers
face in these jobs is important to evaluating their promise as a community economic
development strategy. In the next chapter, I will elaborate upon where their successes may lie
and how their potential may be realized.
Chapter 4
Cooperatives in the cleaning industry: A comparison of employment
outcomes and business success
In this chapter, I present my findings from a comparison of employment outcomes and business
success across four different house and office cleaning firms. I begin with a brief description of
each case: a cooperative, a maid service franchise, a unionized janitorial firm, and an
independent house cleaner. Then I compare wages and benefits, opportunities for mobility and
training, control, and job satisfaction. These findings are supported by information gathered
from sources outside of the case studies, which help to describe how "typical" the outcomes are
in each category of work. Finally, I look at business strategy and success, paying close attention
to lessons cooperatives may take away from the experiences of their competitors. Throughout, I
evaluate the potential of cooperative cleaning businesses to improve employment outcomes for
workers in the cleaning industry, and how that potential might be realized.
I began with three questions, which will frame the bulk of my analysis. I have already provided a
partial answer to the first, What criteriashould be used to evaluate employment outcomesfrom a
"community economic development" program? Proponents of cooperative ownership believe
that equity, efficiency, and community orientation are all outcomes cooperatives provide to
workers and communities. The quality of work experience, they argue, is improved by the
control workers wield over management of the business and the work process. In this final
chapter, I dig a little bit deeper into just what these things mean to the workers who have
participated in cooperatives, and to other cleaning workers who might benefit from such a
program. Their experiences help to illuminate the place these outcomes hold among the range of
other goals and preferences immigrant cleaning workers express, the trade-offs they are willing
to make among outcomes, and the obstacles they face along the way.
This leads to my second question, Can cooperative ownership of cleaningfirms help to bring
about these desirableoutcomes? In chapter 3, I began to describe the characteristics of cleaning
jobs, and problems that workers face in these jobs. Now I compare experiences of workers in a
cooperative with those in other kinds of work arrangements to better understand whether and
how employment outcomes are improved in the coop. I also evaluate business success to better
understand the obstacles to making such a cleaning cooperative profitable and sustainable. This
is important in determining whether this form of business development program is viable as an
employment generation strategy.
Strong evidence that these obstacles do exist leads directly to my third question: Are there
lessons from other cleaningfirms that can help guide cooperative business development efforts?
If cooperatives do, indeed, have difficulty achieving success in the cleaning industry, the
experiences of successful firms within that industry may help them to design a more effective set
of business strategies. The four case studies in this chapter help to develop a set of "best
practices" and recommendations for how cleaning coops may become more competitive without
sacrificing the other benefits they provide to their members.
The four cases
Eco-cleaning
Eco-cleaning was started by a Boston CDC after a community planning process identified the
need for more quality employment options for neighborhood residents. They conducted a market
analysis, which indicated that there was an ample market for a house cleaning business in the
local area. The CDC decided to establish a worker-owned cooperative, based on many of the
"justifications for cooperative ownership" that I listed in the first chapter. The community will
benefit, Eco-cleaning's business plan asserts, because worker-owned companies are loyal to local
interests. Furthermore, worker-owners will make decisions based on both improving efficiency
and providing long-term job security. The benefits workers reap were predicted to come in the
form of increased take-home pay, a share of profits, and development of management and
leadership skills.
Six potential members were identified, five of whom ended up founding the company, through
local networks and by publicizing the opportunity at community events. These members met for
three months of training, three hours per week, prior to establishing the business. Trainings
covered group decision-making skills, conflict resolution, business financial management,
marketing, and the structure of a cooperative. It was decided that the new business would target
a niche market, using non-toxic cleaning methods and products and promoting the cooperative
structure and "local flavor" of the business to attract customers who value promoting
environmentally safe practices, purchasing local services, and supporting non-exploitative
employment.
In 1998, Eco-cleaning organized as a worker-owned cooperative (subject to special tax status
under the Internal Revenue Code), drafted by-laws, secured a loan, hired a manager, and were
open for business. Each member invested $500 as member shares, which was subtracted from
his or her paycheck over time. The CDC covered initial start-up costs, donated office space, and
devoted staff time to assisting with training and management of the business. The initial plan
was to create a business that would pay workers $12 an hour with health benefits, and that would
provide substantial employment after one or two years. In the coop's business plan, it was
projected that by the end of 1998, three full-time and six part-time staff would be employed by
Eco-cleaning, and that by the end of 2000, the business would support seven full-time
employees.
These ambitious projections have failed to come to fruition. Currently worker-members are paid
$10 an hour, they receive no health benefits, and only one of the worker-owners is employed fulltime at Eco-cleaning. Four of the initial five members continue to invest a great deal of time into
the business (one member suffers from health problems, and decided to take a break until she
recovers), often working without pay when there is not enough money to cover all expenses.
They attend weekly meetings to resolve disagreements and develop strategies, and spend several
days a month distributing flyers to potential customers. Despite some noticeable setbacks, the
business is growing. They have around thirty regular house and office cleaning contracts, and are
securing more commercial and office spaces. The CDC that started Eco-cleaning continues to
provide support in the form of office space and staff time, and retains an ownership interest and a
position on the Board of Directors. They are committed to helping the cooperative succeed, but
have recently begun to question their continued support of an as yet unprofitable small business
venture.
The business currently consists of five members, two employees (who become eligible for
membership after a year with the company), and a hired manager. All are immigrants from the
Dominican Republic, El Salvador, or Puerto Rico; only the manager speaks English fluently.
Three of the members and the two employees are women, two of the members are men, and the
manager is a man. The manager works part time, handling scheduling, accounting, and payroll.
He also is responsible for visiting potential clients and estimating the time and cost for each job.
Because most of the members have other jobs, and the women have young children, they work
with the manager to schedule their hours with the company around these other constraints. They
clean either in pairs or separately, driving to clients who are often dispersed throughout Boston.
Each member also takes responsibility for some aspect of managing the business, including
coordinating advertising, depositing payroll, and purchasing supplies.
Maids, Inc.
Maids, Inc. is a maid service company in Boston that is part of a corporate chain of franchises.
The national office provides the franchise owner with a brand name, a set of products and
procedures, training videos for new cleaners, accounting programs, technical support,
advertising, and the opportunity to attend conferences and trainings. In return, the owner of each
franchise pays an initial franchise fee, and then a percentage of all revenues, to the corporate
office. Basically, each franchise operates like a small business, but with the backing of a large
and well-organized corporation.
The particular Maids, Inc. franchise that I studied was established around 25 years ago. It has
gone through four different owners, who had varying levels of success, and was bought by its
current owner four years ago. He has transformed the business from a money-losing venture to
one experiencing high levels of growth. The cleaning staff has increased from six to twenty and
their weekly sales have grown five fold.
The business is managed by the owner, his wife, and a general manager who has been with the
company for several years. Beyond these three, who make the majority of the business decisions,
there is a small hierarchy, consisting of an office assistant, a quality control manager, and a
trainer. The twenty members of the cleaning staff are divided into ten teams, consisting of a
"team mate" and a "captain" who has usually been with the company longer and gets paid a little
more. The staff converges on the office at 8:00, where they drink some coffee, collect their
cleaning supplies and notebooks detailing their assignments, and then head out to clean houses.
They arrive at the first house at 9:00 a.m. and work until they finish the houses assigned to them
that day, earning a fixed percentage of every contract. Each job is priced based on an estimate
one of the managers makes during a visit to the house. The first cleaning is always more
expensive, and then price varies by the number of times each month the team is hired, and the
estimated length and difficulty of the job.
Each cleaning team drives to the customer's house, spends one to two hours whipping through
with dust cloth, vacuum, and mop, and then moves on to the next house. Employees have some
flexibility with their hours, and seem to have a good relationship with the owner and manager,
but have no responsibility for the management or policy decisions of the business and no union.
The majority of the workforce (16 of the 20 employees) are Latino immigrants, from the
Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and El Salvador. About half are women and half are men.
Many work part time for unionized janitorial firms, cleaning houses during the day and offices in
the evening.
Service Cleaning
Service Cleaning is a mid-sized janitorial firm in Boston, with between 400 and 450 employees
(larger firms may hire upwards of a thousand). It was started in the 1950s, and has since then
gone through a number of changes, becoming part of a national service company in the 1970s,
and then spinning off as a janitorial and maintenance company a few years later. They currently
provide contract maintenance services, cleaning services, and snow removal for institutions,
offices, and commercial buildings. Small and large spaces, single and multi-tenant buildings,
universities and police stations are all within their purview.
Service Cleaning has been a signatory with Local 254 of the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) for over thirty years. This means that they participate in contract negotiations with
the union, which set wages and benefits for all signatory cleaning firms. It also means that their
employees are educated on their rights by the union, and have access to a representative who will
handle any complaints they may have concerning their working conditions. Service Cleaning has
a stable and seemingly friendly relationship with the union, and the member of their management
team who I interviewed feels they reap significant benefits from the stability high unionization
rates in Boston lend to an industry that is extremely price-competitive.
The employees of the company are divided into a number of tiers. There are 15 salaried
positions, carrying a range of responsibilities such as developing contacts with potential clients,
estimating costs, developing business goals and strategies, handling payroll and complaints, and
managing an array of other aspects of day-to-day operations. Wage positions are organized into a
hierarchy, with cleaners at the bottom, then lead person, foreman, area supervisor, building
supervisor, and manager. Around 50 percent of Service Cleaning's employees are part time, or
work under 29 hours, compared to an industry average of 75 to 80 percent part time. They have
been able to maintain this high proportion of full time employees because they have a number of
contracts with institutions that require day-time services. Most offices require that cleaning work
be done only at night or in the early morning. Their workforce is between 80 and 85 percent
Spanish speaking, with equal numbers of men and women.
Employees are hired to work on a specific contract in a specific building - if the company loses
the contract and there are no new contracts to absorb the workers, they must find a new job. The
work employees do varies by the contract, as well. Some clean offices, others do housekeeping
work in college dormitories. Every customer has a different set of needs, which then become the
daily or weekly routine of the workers.
Alicia
Alicia works as an independent house cleaner in Boston. She came to Boston four years ago
from Brazil, where she worked for eight years in a store owned by her uncle, helping him to
make and to sell jewelry. Her sister was here already, and she decided she wanted to see what
the United States was like. Alicia ended up staying, and feels like she will probably live here for
a long time. She now has a husband, also from Brazil, and feels like she has a lot of
opportunities here that she did not have in her country.
When she first arrived in the U.S., Alicia got a job working for what she describes as a small
cleaning company, with a man she had met through friends. The company consisted of the
owner and her; together they cleaned houses, sometimes six or seven daily. The "owner" of the
business paid her $15 to $17 for each house, which came out to around $350 to $400 a week.
Gradually Alicia started getting her own clients, beginning with two houses her sister left her
when she went home to Brazil. She left flyers advertising her cleaning services at houses in
different Boston neighborhoods, and started getting many referrals from satisfied customers.
Now Alicia cleans three to four houses a day, often with the help of her husband or sister,
working around 40 hours a week.
Employment outcomes
These brief sketches of four cleaning businesses introduce some basic differences and similarities
among them. The size, target market, and nature of the work vary, but they share in common an
immigrant workforce and a work routine largely composed of low-skilled tasks. In the following
pages, I will look at the experiences of these workers to better understand why they do cleaning
work and how it differs in each work arrangement.
1. Wages and Benefits
Eco-Cleaning
Wages and benefits vary only slightly among the different cases. The wage for the members of
Eco-cleaning is $10 an hour. This, of course, does not include uncompensated time spent
attending meetings, performing management responsibilities, and driving between jobs. In
theory, members will share profits according to hours worked, but this benefit has not yet
materialized. They have workers' compensation and general liability insurance, but no health
benefits. The employees who are not members are paid $8 an hour, but have no obligation to
attend meetings or take on other responsibilities within the company. As noted earlier, most
members have other part time or full time jobs; all of them have health benefits either through
these jobs or through their spouse.
I was able to get information about wages and benefits from nine other cleaning cooperatives,
three of which were started by the same organization. Wages at these cooperatives range from
$6.25 to $14 an hour, with an average of $10. Most have a wage scale, with wages and benefits
increasing with seniority. Three coops started by Women's Action to Gain Economic Security
(WAGES) in Mountain View, California pay $14 an hour at the top of their wage scale also pay
their members $8 an hour for attending meetings.
Benefits vary among the coops according to business structure and success. Those that are
organized as Limited Liability Companies, rather than as worker-owned cooperatives,
"redistribute profits" twice a month based on hours worked instead of paying wages. Because
these LLCs do not have "payroll", undocumented workers are able to get paid as owners without
breaking the law. They also do not have to pay Social Security taxes and Workers
Compensation; but this also means that workers are unable to collect Social Security and
Workers Compensation.
Six of the cooperatives provide health benefits, and three provide paid vacations. One Los
Angeles coop gives all members cell phones, a benefit they decided was valuable because many
are undocumented and are unable to get their own phone line without a social security number.
The cooperatives obviously differ in their ability to provide good wages and benefits; this is in
part connected to how many years they have been in operation, and the local market for their
services. I will look at these differences in greater depth when I discuss business strategy.
Maids, Inc.
Maids, Inc. structures wages based on the homes cleaned, and builds incentives into payment.
The manager quoted wages ranging from $7 to $10 an hour. One of the workers I interviewed
broke it down for me based on one house she was cleaning: Maids Inc. charges the customer $74.
$10 of that amount is used to pay for "non-payroll expenses". The remaining $64 goes to
"payroll expenses" and 20 percent of that $64 goes to each worker. Other payroll expenses
include salaries of the manager and the owner, training wages, payroll taxes, liability insurance,
and other costs directly related to labor.
So, for that client, she was paid around $12.80 for two hours of cleaning, maybe one and a half
hours if she worked quickly, which comes out to between $6.40 and $8.50 per hour. The
percentage each cleaner is paid varies: team captains may make from 22 to 23 percent of a
contract, and if the job is very "nasty" or difficult, the percentage may be raised as high as 25
percent. This decision is left to the owner's discretion. Maids, Inc. employees, like the
cooperative members, are not paid for time driving between the customers' houses, but they are
reimbursed for mileage. Most employees work between 25 to 35 hours a week, and 75 percent
work a second job in the evening.
Benefits vary across Maids, Inc. franchises, as each owner is given some flexibility to decide
what he or she can afford to pay. At the franchise I studied, employees have workers'
compensation and liability insurance, but no health benefits or pension. After working for one
year with the company, they are eligible for one week paid vacation. Several years ago the owner
tried offering health benefits, but most employees did not want them, as they were already
covered through their other jobs or their spouses.
These wages and benefits are probably typical of maid service companies, but there is no doubt
that local labor market conditions and the size of the market for cleaning services contribute to
geographical differences. An article by Barbara Ehrenreich quotes lower numbers for a similar
cleaning franchise in Portland, Maine: $200 for a forty-hour week (forty hours including unpaid
time driving from house to house). Ehrenreich worked for Maids International in Portland, and
was paid what amounted to $6.10 an hour, unless she was being punished for an absence which
dropped her wage to $5.50 an hour (2000, p. 65). The franchise I studied did not incorporate
these "punishments" for absence into the wage calculation. Maid service firms all offer workers'
compensation and liability insurance, but, as at Maids, Inc., decisions about benefits such as
health insurance and paid holidays are for the most part left to the franchise owner.
Service Cleaning
Service Cleaning pays standard union wages and benefits. In Boston, each worker receives $9.40
in wages, $1.10 for health benefits, and $0.40 for pension for each hour worked, or $11 to $12 an
hour, on average. Pay varies according to an employee's length of time with the company and
his or her position in the company hierarchy. At Service Cleaning, new workers are paid $8.40
to $8.50 for the first thirty days with the company. After thirty days, they start the process of
initiation into the union, and each worker must then pay dues of $15 to $16 a month, as well as
an initiation fee of $20. At this point, the cleaner's hourly wage is raised to $9.40. There are
varying pay scales for different positions: a lead cleaner starts at $10 an hour, and the foreman
starts at $11.50 to $12 an hour. The first year, each worker's salary increases by $0.15 every six
months, the second year it increases $0.20 every six months, and the third year it increases by
$0.25 every six months. Over a three year period, there is a total of a $1.30 increase, depending
on the market.
Increases are negotiated by a representative group of union members and their agent every three
years. The Association of Contractors meets prior to this negotiation to review the pension and
benefits plan and to make suggestions as to "where the pay and the benefits should go." They
form a consensus on what their position should be, and then go to their customers with the plan.
The manager described this process:
Because this is a liberal state, the customer often wants to make sure the people working in their buildings
have health care. The question is always the part timers. If they work only four hours, why should they
get health benefits? This is what they always ask us. It's always a debate. We take back their suggestions
and input to the negotiating table. If things get tight, we might have to go back to a less generous plan.
Next year the agreement with the union will be renegotiated, and the issue of health benefits for
part time workers will be a prominent point of contention.
Those who work under 29 hours do not receive health benefits - this is the only part of the
compensation package that differs between part-time and full time workers. Full time workers
have a comprehensive health plan that is handled through the union and fully funded by the
employer. 2,400 workers are covered by this multi-employee benefit plan, which provides
complete dependent coverage, dental, eyesite, with no waiting periods or deductibles. Service
Cleaning is unusual, in that 50 percent of its work force is full time: as noted earlier, the industry
average is 75 to 80 percent part time.
All workers at Service Cleaning get ten holidays and a week's paid vacation. The percentage of
pay an employee gets during holidays and vacation varies: the first year, he or she gets one
percent, the second year two percent, up to eight percent after eight years with the company.
Workers also are allowed three days for bereavement if a family member passes away. Each
pays $24 a month into the pension plan administered by the union, and are able to collect their
pension if they stay with the company for five years. If they leave before these five years, the
money they paid into the pension plan stays in the industry. After ten years working for the
union, a cleaner would receive $240 a month in pension payments. Employers are also required
to provide worker's compensation, social security, and liability insurance.
Unionized cleaning workers in Boston all have the same wages and benefits, in theory. Based on
my conversations with several employees at other unionized firms, there is some variability in
whether employers stick to the union wage scale: one woman was making $7.50 an hour, and one
man was making $8 an hour. SEIU tries to police its membership to make sure the employers are
consistently paying union wages, but they acknowledge that some are able to circumvent the
rules.
In other parts of the country, wages and benefits for unionized employees differ both in theory
and in practice. The 1995-2000 Maintenance Contractors' Agreement negotiated in Los Angeles
between SEIU and employers provided for an increase in wages by 2000 to $7.20 an hour with
full benefits in core office areas, permitting lower wages and benefits as the contract moves
aware from these core areas. One woman I spoke with who has worked with a cooperative
cleaning business in Los Angeles for several years noted that even unionized workers there were
not making much more than the minimum wage - depending on where they are cleaning, wages
run between $6.50 and $7.50 an hour. The members of her coop are making $10 an hour, and
feel lucky to have such a high paying job.
I do not have figures on wages and benefits unionized cleaning workers receive in each region of
the country, but it is likely that local labor market and demand conditions influence the contract
union locals are able to negotiate, as in Los Angeles. The concentration of unionized firms also
may affect this variation. The goal of the union is to take wages out of competition; as their
presence diminishes, their ability to exert a strong influence on industry norms also diminishes.
SEIU representatives and members of the management team at Service Cleaning drove this point
home: janitorial work is extremely price competitive and labor is the most significant cost.
Wages and benefits are the easiest things to cut in order to gain a competitive edge.
Alicia
Alicia's wages and benefits are very straightforward compared to the tangle of conditions to
which unionized employees are subject. She charges $20 to $25 an hour, and receives no
benefits. For the first cleaning at a new customer's house, which often takes six or seven hours,
she charges $150 to $200.
"Sometimes the customers, they say, 'oh, that is too much, I cannot pay so much' when I tell them the
price for the first cleaning. So I say, just let me clean your house, then you can decide whether you want
to pay me so much. Usually they will pay, they are so happy with my work. Sometimes when they see
how clean it is, they pay me $230 instead of just $200. It is not very hard to make money cleaning
houses."
This wage is quite a bit higher than that received by any of the other cleaning workers
interviewed. Alicia does not feel that lack of benefits is a problem; she is young and seemingly
healthy, has no children, and is very careful not to break anything in her customers' houses.
Alicia's experience falls decisively on the upper end of the wage spectrum for independent house
cleaners. The other independent I interviewed is paid $10 for doing this work, and Alicia was
paid somewhere between $8 and $10 an hour when she was working for another house cleaner.
The wage for independent house cleaners is the most variable of the different work arrangements
I have described, as it is often based on an informal contract between the worker and the client.
In 1974 domestic work was brought under the minimum wage laws for the first time, but this has
not stopped employers from hiring household workers and paying them well below the minimum
wage. Salzinger cites wages in the San Francisco Bay Area that run between $5 and $10 per hour
(1991, p.150). Organizers at the Workplace Project, a non-profit agency that works with
immigrant workers on Long Island, New York, reported that wages for domestics there ranged
from $25 to $65 for a day's work (Gray 1998, p.3).
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found full-time "private household cleaners and servants" earning
a median annual income of $12,220 in 1998, which is over $1,000 below the poverty level for a
family of three. Abuses of immigrant domestics, particularly those who are working illegally in
the United States, include non-payment of wages or wages set below the legal minimum (Gray
1998, Ehrenreich 2000). In all cases, independents must purchase their own health, workers'
compensation, and liability insurance, which they rarely do. If they report their income, they
must pay Social Security taxes and are eligible for Social Security benefits, but again, most
income goes unreported. And of course, they have no paid holidays.
This paints a picture of independent housecleaning as potentially a very profitable endeavor, or
potentially a very low-paying job. Salzinger explains this wage disparity in terms of a
"bifurcated market" for cleaning work, in which there is an increasing demand for domestic
services from single, elite professionals, as well as from two-earner working class families and a
rising number of elderly people living alone on fixed incomes. Households with more money
can afford to pay a higher rate for cleaning services than those with less income, and are able to
bargain with prospective employees who they feel will offer them a quality service. Those with
fewer resources often need the services, but simply cannot afford to pay wages that are "anything
but exploitative" (1991, p. 1 50).
Of course, the wages the wealthy are willing to pay for cleaning work are subject to personal
preferences and attitudes, availability of cheap household labor, as well as the organization and
professionalization of cleaning work. Zoe Baird lost the opportunity to be attorney general in
1993 partly due to her practice of hiring undocumented household workers. This up and coming
professional paid her workers about $5 an hour out of her earnings of $507,000 a year
(Ehrenreich 2000, p.64). Salzinger (1991) and Romero (1992) point to the growth of maid
service companies, which charge a premium for providing a "professional" cleaning service to
customers, as one factor that has helped to push up the price employers expect to pay.
Wages for independent house cleaning, as for other kinds of cleaning work, are also likely to vary
across different parts of the country in response to differing labor market conditions. In southern
California, there are many Latino immigrants who are recent arrivals. If they are undocumented,
they have few alternatives in the formal labor market. One woman who helped to establish a
cleaning cooperative in Los Angeles described an extremely competitive market for cleaning
services. At every house they go to place a flyer advertising their services, there are already five
to ten flyers advertising house cleaning, gardening, carpentry, and a range of other services - all
off the books and under the table. She said that in Boulder the average wage for cleaning work is
close to $20, while for the members of her coop, $10 was at the top of the pay scale.
In Boston, the alternatives available and the tight labor market may help to push the wage up for
independent cleaning work. If an immigrant with poor English skills can just as easily get a job
in a unionized company that pays close to $10 an hour and provides stable employment, the wage
for house cleaning work is likely to be higher, as well. The director of a Boston non-profit that
assists immigrant workers noted that independent house cleaners are doing pretty well here, with
high wages and working conditions, and that many of the cleaning workers who work for larger
firms would prefer to do this kind of work. Most do not know where to find the customers,
however, and do not speak English well enough to communicate with potential customers or to
earn their trust.
Summary
This comparison illustrates that cooperatives pay relatively good wages (in a few of the more
successful cases, excellent wages) for cleaning work. Their success is in part a function of the
alternatives available to the individuals who become worker-members. If a house cleaner or
janitor in Los Angeles makes barely above minimum wage, $10 an hour is very attractive. In
Boston, $10 is fairly close to the wage a worker can get at a unionized firm, and a little better
than he or she would make working at a maid service company. It is certainly less than one
could theoretically earn working as an independent house cleaner, but it may be difficult to gain
access to the networks necessary to enter the high end of this market.
Lack of health insurance and paid vacations is a problem characteristic of cleaning work, outside
of unionized firms and some maid service companies. Some cooperatives have been able to
provide good benefits packages, but Eco-cleaning clearly has been unable to offer better benefits
than are available to members at other jobs. Tables 1 and 2 summarize the differences in wages
and benefits across the four cases studies and the nine cooperative firms.
Table 1: Differences in wages and benefits among cleaning firms
Business
Wage
(low)
Wage
(high)
Health
benefits
Eco-cleaning
$8
$10
no
Maids, Inc.
Service
$7
$9.40
$10
$10.70 and
no
yes
no
Liability
Insurance
Paid
Vacation
Pension
yes
yes
no
no
yes
yes
yes
yes
no
yes
no
yes
no
no
no
no
Workers
Comp/
Social
Security
Cleaning
Alicia
UP
$20
$25
Table 2: Differences in wages and benefits among cooperative cleaning businesses
Cleaning
Cooperative
Eco-cleaning*
Emma's Ecoclean
Heaven Sent
Non-Toxic
Professional
Housecleaners
Manos
Janitorial
Services
Placerville
Wage (high) Health
Benefits
Wage (low)
Liability
Workers
Comp/ Social Insurance
Security
Paid Vacation Pension
$10
$10
$10 no
$14 yes
yes
no
yes
no
no
no
no
no
$10
$10
$14 yes
$14 yes
no
no
no
no
no
no
no
no
$8
$10 yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
$8.50
$10 no
no
yes
no
no
Cooperative
Pueblo Nuevo
Enterprises,
$6.25
$7 yes
yes
yes
yes
no
$8
$10 yes
no
yes
no
no
$8
$8 yes
yes
yes
yes
no
$8
$10 no
yes
yes
no
no
Inc.
Dynamic
Workers
Restif
Janitorial
Services
Always Ready
*Eco-cleaning is the only pseudonym used in this table
These findings raise several questions. First, what accounts for the differences among the four
cases and among the nine cleaning cooperatives in their ability to pay good wages and benefits?
A comparison of business success among the firms will dig a bit deeper into the conundrum of
how a firm generates the revenues to pay employees well. Second, if the wages and benefits are
not significantly higher, are there other benefits that the members of Eco-cleaning gain from
being part of a cooperative? Why do they stick with it? The answer to this question lies in a
comparison among other outcomes across cleaning jobs.
2. Opportunities for advancement, training, and skill development
The opportunities for advancement, training, and skill development that a job provides are a
second measure of the quality of work experience. These may include job ladders within the
firm, which allow an employee to gain a higher salary, greater responsibility, and additional
training. They also could include training or skill development on the job that help the employee
to eventually move to a more high skilled, better paid position in another firm through starting
their own cleaning firm, acquiring a management position in a different cleaning firm, or moving
into a completely different line of work. Finally, employees may have access to general training
or educational opportunities through their union, a non-profit organization, or an employer that
has made a commitment to bettering the lives of their employees. To provide mobility, this
training should lead directly to a better job, or, in the case of the cooperative, to improved
business success. There are other benefits to education that are more difficult to measure, such
as increased self-esteem and "community leadership skills".
Cooperative supporters claim that worker-owned coops provide a special training function,
giving low skilled residents access to both business management and leadership skills. They also
claim that members benefit from mobility in earnings, by being able to capture in full the profits
of business growth. I will compare the availability of these opportunities across the four cases I
studied to gauge whether the cooperative indeed provides these benefits, how they compare to
those available in other cleaning businesses, and the value workers place on such opportunities.
Eco-cleaning
At Eco-cleaning, training has been a major part of the members' experience during their three
years with the business. They went through three months of training, three hours per week, prior
to establishing Eco-cleaning. These trainings covered group decision-making skills, conflict
resolution, business financial management, marketing, and how a cooperative is structured.
After two years, members participated in another series of trainings. I worked with a popular
educator for several months teaching members how to conduct an evaluation, and then facilitated
a nine month evaluation process that was intended to develop decision-making and planning
skills.
In the past several months, Eco-cleaning members have been attending sessions teaching them
how to market their business and how to read and interpret financial statements. One coop
member is learning to use the company's computer accounting program from a staff member at
the CDC, and I have started teaching a weekly English class following each meeting. As noted
earlier, mobility in earnings has not materialized, and this training has not led directly to
profitability. It has, however, allowed members to take on more responsibility for the
management of their company to develop new skills.
I asked members during interviews whether this training was valuable to them, and received
similar responses from each. All felt this was an important reason for joining Eco-cleaning: "to
learn new skills," "to learn how to manage a business," and "to progress" were all expressions of
this theme. When I asked them to compare their jobs in the cooperative with other cleaning jobs
they have held, they invariably note the benefits of the training and the skill development the
cooperative provides. One woman feels she has learned to communicate better with people: "I
am very shy, and it was hard for me to say what I thought about something, but now I speak at
meetings and tell people what I think." Several said they had learned "to be in charge of my own
business and my own work." Others have learned how to "think like a business owner and not
just like a worker," to see each customer as a link to other customers, and to think in terms of
long-term plans for the business rather than just short term profit.
None of the members were quite sure how they would use these skills in other jobs, but all felt
that they were helping them to improve Eco-cleaning and to have more oversight over the
manager. In other jobs, several noted, you learn nothing, you just clean and that is it. Being part
of the cooperative is more like being in school, learning both to take on more responsibility and
to rely on and trust other people. It is difficult, they concluded in each interview, but very
valuable.
Members' perceptions of mobility in their job are very positive. This was surprising to me, given
the ongoing problems Eco-cleaning faces. Even though the business is not doing very well right
now, and they often do not get paid, they believe that eventually they will build a successful
company with higher wages, more employees and members, and profits. This is why they stick
with the company: in their other jobs at larger cleaning firms, they have no chance of being
promoted or getting more training, because they do not speak English. At Eco-cleaning they do
feel that they do have these opportunities. One member said, "In [Eco-cleaning], I think I will
someday have another job in the company, managing or using more business skills. In other jobs
it is very difficult. I don't think I will be promoted, or get a better paying job in the company. I
will just keep cleaning, that is all."
Most other cleaning cooperatives have a similar focus on training. Investment in training is one
of the largest categories of support given by the non-profits and churches that initiate these
businesses. Among the coops about which I was able to gather information, only Restif Cleaners
and Manos Janitorial Services do not offer training to employees beyond simple cleaning skills.
These were also the only two coops that were started by workers without assistance from a social
service agency. Members have little direct input into the day-to-day operations of these
businesses. The training offered by the other seven coops includes group decision-making,
leadership, cleaning skills, ESL, business management and finance, marketing, and computer
skills.
Each cooperative has a different method and theory for how and how long this training should be
provided. WAGES, which has been helping women start cooperative cleaning businesses since
1994, trains a group of potential members for a year prior to establishing a coop. They tried to
start a fourth cooperative recently with a shorter training process, but they found that there was
"not enough group buy-in", and had to close after a few months of operation. WAGES staff
believe participation in accounting and financial decisions are key to building power and
ownership among members. Because of this, they invest a great deal of time in teaching
computer skills and consistently divide up finance related tasks among the members. They also
charge the cooperative for staff time, which they feel ensures that the technical assistance and
meeting facilitation WAGES provides is valued by members.
Dynamic Workers in Los Angeles jumped right into finding cleaning jobs for their members,
operating initially as a job distribution coop, and provided the necessary training as they went
along. Members were recently sent to a small business conference downtown, where they
attended workshops for three days, and came back saying that the workshops covered what they
had already learned from non-profit staff. The staff member I interviewed saw signs that
members were developing real business and leadership skills. "They were out there hob-nobbing
with the suits, and it meant a lot, to be on-par with these people. 'You have opened my eyes to a
world I didn't even know existed' one woman said to me when she came back. This is what
we're doing, you can see it's happening. It's about self-esteem and empowerment."
Mobility varies among the coops, as well. Most have some wage scale; the three WAGES
cooperatives have a pay increase of $1 a year. Others provide for a total of a $2 wage increase
over time. Pueblo Nuevo in Los Angeles and the WAGES coops provide the opportunity for
members to fill paid management positions. This allows them to take a break from cleaning
work and to learn new skills, while still being compensated for their time. Manos and Restif
both make a profit that they distribute to members at the end of the year, which offers earnings
mobility as the company grows.
The coop members and non-profit staff members I interviewed almost all agreed that belonging
to a coop is not just like any other cleaning job. They feel it provides a unique opportunity in the
cleaning industry for workers to gain a wide range of skills in their workplace. For Eco-cleaning
members, it also contributes to an anticipation of future mobility. To understand whether and
how this is different from the training and opportunities for mobility offered in other cleaning
businesses, I now turn to the three remaining cases.
Maids, Inc.
Maids, Inc. provides quite a bit of training in cleaning methods and customer service, but
predictably little in the way of management skills. New employees are in training for two weeks,
and then they are put on the job. They watch a series of training videos, which feature a smiling
blonde with a dust cloth and a set of bottles with different colored liquids who goes over the
"[Maids, Inc.] Way" of cleaning, room by room. New recruits then take a CD-rom test, and
finally go out with the trainer to start cleaning houses.
Mobility within the firm is theoretically possible. Maids, Inc. emphasizes in their training videos
the opportunities for a cleaner to get a higher wage by working harder and faster, because pay is
based on a percentage of all contracts. They also present the possibility that a worker will
eventually be able to buy a franchise of their own. I do not have any figures to confirm how
common this is, but the video claims that "many of our most successful franchise owners started
out as [Maids, Inc.] team mates." These franchises come in three sizes, which cost $16,000,
$20,000, and $24,000 respectively - beyond the reach of the employees I interviewed.
There is also a small hierarchy within the firm, starting with team mate, and moving up to
captain, trainer, quality control manager, office assistant, general manager. The owner told me,
"We try to promote from within. For example, to quality control. [Maids, Inc.] has formal
training programs for different positions. I try to eye-ball someone in the field to figure out if
they're worthy, capable of doing the job. I'd rather promote from inside." When I asked how he
decided which employees to train, he replied:
"It's basically a gut feeling. If they're responsible, reliable. The way they present themselves. Seldom
are they actually promoted. There have been a few I've tried to promote to quality control. If you can
communicate the mission, they may do a good job. They usually feel flattered to be considered for the
position, and try it out for several months. They usually want to go back to cleaning after that. It's a hard
job."
The owner told me that turnover is about 200 percent, with most workers staying for one and a
half years. These numbers seem to tell an inconsistent story; the first probably reflects the high
number of recruits who stay for only several weeks, and the second the experience of the
manager with those who stay with the company beyond this trial period. Several cleaners have
worked there for between nine and sixteen years, and are paid at a higher rate, as well as given
greater flexibility to choose the customers for whom they prefer to work.
The employees I interviewed at Maids, Inc. do not feel they have much chance of being
promoted. Again, those who do not speak English well listed English as the greatest barrier to
getting a better job within the firm, as well as to moving to a better job outside of the firm. Two
workers interviewed speak English, but agreed that they would probably continue to work as
cleaners. For these workers, the benefits they derived from the job were not attached to wages or
to opportunities for training and advancement. The owner of the franchise felt that the promotion
and training system at Maids, Inc. was common across other maid service companies.
Service Cleaning
Service Cleaning provides workers with basic training in cleaning methods. They show films
and hold training sessions at the site at which they will work, and when there is a new piece of
equipment, they demonstrate how to use it. Their priority is to teach the employees the proper
procedures to follow so that no one gets injured and the job is professionally done. If there are
mistakes or problems, special training sessions will be held.
Because Service Cleaning employees are members of SEIU Local 254, they also have access to a
range of training programs through the union. These include ESL classes, a G.E.D. prep
program, maintenance training, computer training, adult literacy, and citizenship classes. There
are also opportunities to pursue higher degrees, including a scholarship program that provides
free college level courses leading to a Certificate or an Associates Degree in Business
Administration Management, a tuition assistance program that offers ten $3,000 scholarships a
year to members' dependents, and a "community college cost initiative program" which helps
students to attend community college.
The two union representatives with whom I spoke said that the ESL classes were the most
popular by far. They offer several classes at different sites, and recently started another to meet
the growing demand. One felt that a major part of his job was to promote the local's educational
agenda among workers. Sometimes workers may complain about paying dues, but he points out
to them that they can get that money back "if they take advantage of the programs that are out
there."
Both Service Cleaning and SEIU offer opportunities for cleaning workers to advance within their
job. For every ten people working for the company, there are eight cleaners, one lead person, and
one foreman. A supervisor then is responsible for ten to twelve floors, and reports to a building
supervisor, who in turn reports to one of twelve account area managers. The Vice President of
Service Cleaning felt that it was very easy for an employee to move up in the company if he or
she works hard, demonstrates responsibility, and is bilingual. Speaking English is important, but
speaking Spanish is just as important, because so many of their workers speak only Spanish.
Like the owner of the Maids, Inc. franchise, he and other members of the management team
decide which employees to train for these positions based on "gut feeling". Most supervisors
have been promoted through the ranks, or have come from another cleaning company where they
were promoted in this way. Salaried positions within the firm, however, are almost exclusively
held by college educated white males; it appears unlikely that cleaners get promoted to the upper
ranks of management.
There are also opportunities to move up from a cleaning job to a position within the SEIU local.
Many of the union representatives at Local 254 started as immigrant cleaning workers in one of
the large Boston firms. One representative I interviewed worked as a day porter, then was
elected shop steward and placed on the negotiating committee. Eventually he became a field
representative, and was recently promoted to business agent. Both within the company and in the
union, English is a prerequisite for advancing, and there are a limited number of possible
positions within the hierarchy. Inevitably, there are many workers who never get access to these
positions. Turnover is around 10 percent, however, which is considerably lower than the
turnover at Maids, Inc.
Worker perceptions of opportunities for mobility within a unionized cleaning firm were generally
negative. None of the cleaning workers I interviewed, including the cooperative members who
have worked for a unionized cleaning firm, felt they had much chance of moving up within either
the union or the firm. Again, they emphasized English as a key barrier. A shop steward at
Service Cleaning observed that the most common way a worker could advance was from cleaner
to supervisor, and most would prefer to stay cleaners. Supervisors get paid only $0.50 more an
hour, and they have to take on more responsibility. They also hold the unpopular position of
having to tell other workers what to do.
None of the twelve workers who have been employed by a unionized firm were participating in,
or had ever participated in, a training program offered through the union. They knew of them,
but felt that the classes they were interested in, such as ESL and citizenship classes, were held at
locations that were not convenient. The higher education and training programs were not
attractive because they did not have the time to stop working and earn a degree. Someone is
taking advantage of these programs, but the experiences of these workers point to the obstacles
that may keep many from enjoying their potential benefits.
The Vice President of Service Cleaning and the two union representatives feel training and
advancement opportunities are similar across unionized firms in Boston. One union rep knew of
several small cleaning businesses whose owners are former janitors with unionized companies,
but acknowledged that a very small number of workers actually pursue this option. SEIU and the
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) have made commitments to providing
training to their members in other parts of the country, though the Boston local prides itself on
offering "one of the best and most comprehensive menu of education benefits of any Local Union
in America." It is likely that the ability to offer such programs differs by the number of members
and power that a local holds in an area, as well as their priorities for targeting resources.
Alicia
Alicia has an uncomplicated range of opportunities for training and mobility: if she gets more
customers or is able to charge a higher price for her services, her weekly wage goes up.
Acquiring new skills is limited to what she is able to learn on the job. Within these constraints,
Alicia has been able to improve her earnings over time. She has increased her customer base
from two to upwards of twenty houses per week, and is getting paid several times what she was
making at her first cleaning job. She has learned how to clean faster and better, how to market
her business, and how to please the customer: all skills the cooperative members noted they have
gained through running Eco-cleaning.
Alicia also is learning English by talking to her employers while cleaning and having to sell her
service and arrange schedules with them. Coop members, in contrast, are not forced to develop
these skills, as the manager handles all interaction with the customers. When I asked Alicia if
she wanted to expand her business and hire more workers, she replied that this was a possibility,
but she had not really thought about it. If she hired more workers, she would have to keep a
close watch over their work, as whatever they did would reflect on her. She does not feel this job
will necessarily lead to other kinds of job opportunities, but envisions that she will stick with it
for a long time because of the high pay and flexibility it provides.
Limited opportunities for training and mobility are associated with independent cleaning work; it
is often done in isolation, and subsequently lacks the career ladders or training programs a larger
business can provide. The other independent cleaner I interviewed had a less optimistic outlook
on the kinds of skills he was learning on the job. He works alone, doing the same kind of work
he had done for years, and getting paid just enough to keep him doing it. Interviews Leslie
Salzinger (1991) conducted with independent cleaning workers in the San Francisco Bay area
and that Mary Romero (1992) conducted with similar independents in El Paso found that most
women regarded cleaning as a dead end job; the reasons they gave for working as cleaners had
little to do with opportunities for mobility.
Summary
A comparison of the four cases reveals that Eco-cleaning and most other cleaning cooperatives
provide more, and a different kind of, training to members than is typical in cleaning jobs. SEIU
makes available a range of educational opportunities for union members that are supported by
member dues and that surpass what a small coop can offer, but there is no direct connection
between the workplace and the skills learned. Members at Eco-cleaning feel that working in an
environment where they are constantly learning new skills and applying them to improve their
company is a major advantage of owning a coop.
Differences in mobility across the four cases were present only in the attitudes of workers. Ecocleaning members believe that there is more mobility built into their job, and see it as a way to in
the long run increase their earnings and position within the company. This sharply contrasts with
the attitudes of other cleaning workers, who see their jobs either as dead ends, or as a temporary
form of employment they will be in until they learn enough English to get another job. There is a
transformation in the attitudes of the coop members towards cleaning work: it becomes an
opportunity for advancement rather than a job that is held primarily to earn wages.
The lack of training and mobility characteristic of cleaning work is one of the primary
motivations non-profits cite for supporting cooperative cleaning businesses. The majority of
members come to the coops from an employment background where they feel their options are
extremely limited. Coops may be seen as "professionalizing" house cleaning for their members
by building in career ladders, earnings mobility, and training. However, training programs and
staff time are often subsidized by a sponsoring organization that has many potential pulls on its
workforce and business development resources. Other programs teach workers business
management skills or give them access to some opportunities for mobility. This leaves the
question open of whether there are other benefits the coop provides for its members that are
unique to the cooperative workplace.
3. Control
Control in a cleaning business can be broken into two categories: the organization of work (hours
worked, how the job is done) and the administration of the firm (structure of decision-making
responsibilities, client mix, wage level, and marketing). Control over both of these spheres is
often put forth as an advantage cooperatives hold over other forms of employment. I have
already discussed why control is believed to be important: liberal theorists of economic
democracy, socialist theorists, and the range of non-profits and churches that support cooperative
businesses all attach a great deal of social and economic importance to the democratic
governance of enterprises.
To better understand whether Eco-cleaning does, indeed, increase the control members wield
over their work and over the administration of their business, I compare their experiences with
those of workers in the three other work arrangements studied. I am interested not only in
whether they have control in their jobs, but also in the value they place on this control. Did
cooperative members self-select to join Eco-cleaning because they felt flexibility and autonomy
were important? Are there opportunities within other cleaning jobs to exert some amount of
control over the work process, and if so, is this seen as valuable by employees? These questions
run through the findings I present below.
Eco-cleaning
The worker-members of Eco-cleaning feel they have a great deal of control over both their work
and their business. Decisions about how they will work and when they will work are decided
individually or in a group. Members work with the manager to schedule their hours around
constraints, such as children and other jobs. They are not entirely free to do as they please,
because they always need to consider how the company will be affected if they cancel an
appointment or cannot schedule someone to work for a major contract. But the members feel
that even though they made sacrifices "for the company", overall they have a great deal of
flexibility not present in their other jobs.
The members of Eco-cleaning have developed a system for cleaning houses and offices. They
work in pairs: in a house, one cleans the bathroom, the other cleans the kitchen, they wash all the
floors, and then they move through the house dusting and vacuuming, each working at opposite
ends with the other following behind to clean up the dust that has settled after the first cleaning.
Finally, they take the trash out. In offices there are always different requests, but they usually
start with the bathrooms, then dust, take out the trash, vacuum, and finally wash the windows.
Without exception, the members feel that they have more control over how they do their work in
the cooperative than in other firms.
The actual work process is not that different, but the service they are providing has a more direct
connection to their lives outside of work: they feel they will profit and the company will prosper
if it is done well. All are of the opinion that control and participation improves the quality of
their work because they are more invested in the business's success. One member described this
change:
"It's different from other jobs. If I work for someone else, I always have to listen to what the supervisor
tells me. I don't care so much about doing a good job. Here, we're our own supervisors, our own bosses.
We own the company. We want to always do a consistently good job, so we pay attention to details in a
way others might not."
During the evaluation I helped to facilitate, members spent a great deal of time discussing how
they could improve the quality of their work and better coordinate their hours. We distributed a
client survey that indicated overall satisfaction with quality and price of the cleaning service.
There was, however, some dissatisfaction with tardiness, the constant rescheduling of
appointments, and several areas of cleaning work. Members developed a set of strategies to
improve on all of these areas, and to my knowledge have implemented most of them. Problems
with tardiness and rescheduling persist, however. This points to a trade-off that increased control
may introduce: workers have an added incentive to do a good job, but they have multiple pulls on
their time that may not correspond with the interests of the group. It appears the members of
Eco-cleaning are committed to overcoming this problem, and use meetings to reinforce the need
to put the interests of the company ahead of personal interests. This conflict between the
individual's desire for flexibility and autonomy and the business's need to provide a stable and
predictable service to customers remains, however, a source of frustration.
Control over the business is another benefit members feel the cooperative provides. As a group,
they decide who their clients will be, how much to charge for their services, how often and where
they will advertise, how much they will pay themselves and the other workers, and how much
they can afford to spend on other business expenses. All feel this marks a significant departure
from other cleaning jobs they have held. When asked about motivation for joining the
cooperative, one member said, "I wanted to be my own boss. I was tired of working for someone
else. I wanted to work with my friends to build a successful business." Others felt it was
important that they are able to say what they think about something, without fear of being fired.
Members consistently express pride in being "owners" rather than "just employees". This may
be directly connected to development of new skills or being able to have a say in how their
company is run, but I have seen a real sense of satisfaction in the very fact that they are now
business owners. This seems to carry a certain prestige that they value.
The members of Eco-cleaning have found that this administrative control is also accompanied by
some trade-offs. Many joined the coop with the idea that to be an owner meant that they were
free to do whatever they wanted - that no one could tell them what to do or how to do it. They
found that this was only partly true; they have more control, but they also have more
responsibilities. They attend meetings, take on unpaid management tasks, and must make
decisions as a group about how the business is to be organized and run.
Members cannot do whatever they want. They must do what the group wants, and arrive at
consensus as to the best course of action. This introduces frustration with the length of time it
takes to make decisions and implement changes. Indeed, while all feel they have a great deal of
control over decision-making, four of the five members would prefer to own their own business
where they would have total control over how it was run. They agree, however, that it would be
quite difficult for them to own their own business at this point, as they do not have the time or
resources, and see the cooperative as a good compromise. One member prefers to be part of a
cooperative because he does not want to devote the time and resources to run a business by
himself; he feels working with a group takes some of the pressure off, and allows for shared
responsibility.
A final tension associated with control over the management of Eco-cleaning is the relationship
between members and the manager. Many feel they are unable to read and evaluate financial
statements the manager produces. They must delegate a great deal of responsibility to him, and
are as yet unsure of how best to direct his work. Members rely on the manager to decide how
much to charge each customer, to communicate with the customers, and to convey cleaning
instructions and directions to the members. Each member has an idea of how these things could
be changed, which they for the most part agree on, but they have difficulty translating their ideas
into a coherent plan that the manager can implement. Meetings are often spent describing a
series of ongoing problems and telling him that he has to change something.
During interviews, members voiced the sentiment that many of their initial difficulties getting
Eco-cleaning off the ground were related to the manager's inexperience with cleaning work. He
often under-estimated the time it would take to clean a house, scheduled clients too far from each
other, and was not responsive to complaints. Most feel he has improved, but a certain struggle
persists over who is responsible for making which decisions, and how those decisions are to be
implemented.
From the manager's perspective, he has had a difficult time occupying a position that is part
employee, part boss: he is hired by the same people he has to "manage". He must coordinate
work around members' schedules and wait for their approval of most business decisions. Both
sides are in a somewhat awkward position in relation to one another, but are working to improve
the structure that defines their roles and responsibilities. There is an ongoing effort on the part of
non-profit staff, cooperative members, and the manager to develop a clear method for making
decisions as a group and translating these into action. All feel communication is improving, and
that this will result in better outcomes for the business.
Other cooperatives place a similar emphasis on control over work and over business
administration, and claim that achieving this control is a significant positive outcome they
provide members. Two of the coops, Manos and Restif, are managed in a typically hierarchical
manner, with a manager, worker-members, and a board of directors that meets infrequently
(quarterly to yearly) to provide oversight and set long-term goals. I spoke with managers at both
firms, who feel that the cleaning industry does not lend itself to collective decision making; they
are accountable to the members, but value the discretion they retain over making important
business decisions and being able to fire workers if they do not follow the rules of the
cooperative.
The majority of other cooperative cleaning firms are managed similarly to Eco-cleaning: by a
hired manager and members who take on certain administrative roles. One firm, Heaven Sent, is
managed entirely by committees of members. It is difficult to gauge the amount of control
members feel they have over their work and business through one interview, often with a nonprofit staff person, but I was told repeatedly that members feel empowered by making these
decisions, that they are more motivated to do a better job because it is their company, and that
they require less supervision on the job.
There are also a similar range of problems "managing control" in the cooperatives that are not
hierarchically governed, from conflicts or misunderstandings between the manager and members
to difficulties enforcing a set of rules or standards. Coops have developed different systems for
resolving these problems. WAGES encourages their coops to move towards management by
committee, without a hired manager. The two cleaning businesses they are still assisting,
Emma's Eco-clean and Non-toxic Professional Housecleaners, pay a WAGES staff person for
her time both facilitating meetings and helping with the management of the business.
WAGES coops have a "point system" which is based on attendance at meetings and is used to
distribute work. Dynamic Cleaners also has a point system, giving women points for flyering,
and for going to English classes and meetings. The top ten "point getters" have first crack at the
cleaning jobs, and remaining jobs are distributed according to number of points. Dynamic also
has developed a system to discourage women from working part-time, in which the more hours
they work, the smaller percentage of their earnings they are required to put back into the coop.
These various strategies are intended to enforce some consistent set of behaviors that are in the
group's interest through rewards and sanctions. Eco-cleaning members have discussed the
possibility of using a system that more strictly enforced the rules, but decided that they prefer to
retain the flexibility they now have.
Maids, Inc.
At Maids, Inc. the work of cleaning houses is the sole responsibility of the employee. It is,
nonetheless, presented by management as a realm where cleaners have little say in how things are
done. I watched a series of training videos that detail every step in the cleaning process. There
are nine products that are intended to clean different surfaces and parts of the house, each with a
different scent. Workers are armed with three cleaning cloths: red for dusting, blue for windows
and mirrors, and white for all other surfaces. They go out in teams, with one team member
responsible for the "wet work" and the other for the "dry work".
The "wet work" person starts in the bathroom: they are instructed to always leave the tray on the
floor, visually survey the room to remember where objects are placed, then move from top to
bottom, left to right around the room, straightening and cleaning. They clean the toilet in a
prescribed manner, empty the waste basket and spray it with "the Maids, Inc. signature scent",
three-fold the towels, and place a gold seal on the toilet paper. The final step is cleaning the
floors "the old fashioned way: on your hands and knees. Everyone knows a mop just pushes dirt
around, but this way really cleans." Maids in training are assured by the video that they will be
provided with knee-pads to make this part of the work more comfortable. They are also
encouraged to always go above and beyond specific instructions on their customer sheet: "Extra
cleaning efforts will be noticed and appreciated by customers."
Prescribed cleaning methods for the rest of the house are much the same. Workers are to start in
a certain room, make the beds in a certain way, and vacuum using a special "clean for show"
technique. Every step in the process is mapped out ahead of time, with very little room for error.
It makes sense, given that this is a national chain committed to providing a consistent service to
customers. Having tight control over how employees clean each house is a necessary part of
assuring the customer that they will receive the service they are expecting.
Maids, Inc. had seemingly applied the principles of scientific management, or "Taylorism", to
house cleaning work. Braverman describes Frederick Taylor's approach to managing the work
process:
"He asserted as an absolute necessity for adequate management the dictation to the worker of the precise
manner in which work is to be performed. Management, he insisted, could be only a limited and
frustrated undertaking so long as it left to the worker any decision about the work. His "system" was
simply a means for management to achieve control of the actual mode of performance of every labor
activity, from the simplest to the most complicated" (1974, p.90).
This is a sharp departure from the experience of the coop members who have developed
their own system for cleaning a house. It also seems to address, albeit in a way the coop
members would find unpleasant, the problem of providing a consistent service to customers.
I became interested in figuring out just how the Maids, Inc. procedures are implemented by
the workers, who have no direct supervision while in the houses they clean.
I found that the "Maids, Inc. Way" holds little power over the cleaners I accompanied from
house to house. They used mops, used only blue rags and glass cleaner on all surfaces,
vacuumed the floor in the traditional haphazard way, did not clean rooms from left to right,
top to bottom, and failed to put a gold seal on the toilet paper. When asked if they followed
any of the procedures they had learned in the training videos, one of the team members
replied, "No, we don't follow the cleaning video. Nothing in those houses compares to this.
If the bathroom is big, we use the mop, what the heck. Sometimes we kneel to do corners."
The owner acknowledged that it is difficult to police workers, and to make sure that they are
following the proper cleaning procedures.
"About 70 percent follow the [Maids, Inc.] way of cleaning, what they see in the video and on the CDrom. If they don't clean the [Maids, Inc.] way, it affects the quality of the cleaning. It would make their
job easier if they would do this. We're thinking of taking the mops away from them, because they'll do a
better job if they clean on their knees. It's a real problem."
To try to address this problem of monitoring employees, the workers are told to distribute
comment cards to customers, and management tries to inform them of what they should expect
from the team. If there is a complaint, the workers must go back to the house to do it over and
are not paid for this extra work. The owner recently held a series of special training sessions on
how to make beds, because they were getting a lot of complaints. The management of Maids,
Inc. is obviously committed to improving the consistency of the job done by their teams, but have
trouble enforcing a set of rules among employees who are outside of their supervision for most of
their working day.
Other aspects of the Maids, Inc. work structure are intended to give workers more control and
flexibility. They are assigned three or four houses a day, and are permitted to leave whenever
they have finished their houses. The blonde in the training video smilingly informs the trainee
that "with our percentage pay method, you get paid a percentage of the payroll amount no matter
how long it takes you to clean a home. This rewards you for what you've learned."
The workers I interviewed enjoyed the flexibility this built into their job, and cited it as a major
reason why they found working at Maids, Inc. attractive. They were able to leave in time to take
care of their kids, sometimes holding down a second job in the evening. Workers also
appreciated that they were not under the direct supervision of anyone during the day. They
preferred the customer to be absent, as well: "If no one's there, it's the best thing. If you think
about it, it's really mean of them to stick around and check up on everything we do. If they want
us to do a good job, they should leave the house. Sometimes they expect so much from you; they
want their own personal maid."
Other maid service companies have a similarly rigid structure of rules governing how house work
is done, and likewise attribute their success in this industry to their ability to provide a consistent,
high quality product. In web page after web page, these companies advertise cleaning services
provided by employees who have extensive training in their state of the art cleaning methods.
Barbara Ehrenreich describes "the special 'systems' devised by the cleaning services and
imparted to employees via training videos" which leave the worker with few decisions: you start
each task in a certain room, then move through the house, left to right, top to bottom, just as at
Maids, Inc. She writes, "no doubt the biggest advantage of the system is that it helps you achieve
the speed demanded by the company, which allots only so many minutes per house" (2000,
pp.66-67). I do not know how common it is for employees to disregard these rules, but
monitoring their behavior is no doubt similarly difficult for managers of other franchises. At
Maids, Inc. and at other maid service firms, administrative decisions are exclusively made by the
franchise owner and manager.
Service Cleaning
Service Cleaning has a very detailed set of procedures for monitoring its workforce to ensure
they provide a quality service to their customers. During my interview with the Vice President,
he used the word "control" repeatedly without my prompting when describing cleaning methods
and procedures. The most important aspect of that control is making sure workers do just what
the customer expects: "There's a standard set of assumptions in any office building, any business.
When we come in as a contractor, those apply to us. It's important to develop a personal
relationship by adhering to their rules. If they want us to change something, we have to change
it."
In each building, the manager decides how the space is to be cleaned. There are a range of
procedures the management team has developed, depending on the arrangement of the space.
One way is to divide the work among several teams: one does pick up, one dusting, one
vacuuming, then the women clean the women's room and the men clean the men's room. An
area can alternatively be split into four parts, with each part assigned to a different person. Or,
each person could be given a different assignment: one cleaner does all the bathrooms, another
does all the executive areas. The manager looks at the space, develops a plan for the most
efficient way to clean that space, and then distributes well mapped-out tasks to each cleaner.
The process of monitoring the work to ensure quality is left to the supervisors. All surfaces
require a different cleaning material, and all rooms require a certain set of steps; if something is
not done correctly, the supervisor is responsible for making sure the cleaners fix the problem. He
or she has a list, and checks to see that everything on the list is completed before leaving a
building. The Vice President told me that some companies have a computer program that ties
into the supervisor's movements: he clicks off each area on a list, and the computer keeps track
of what tasks have been completed. Service Cleaning uses inspection reports filed by the
supervisors to monitor the work. Management holds regular meetings with cleaners to discuss
special topics, such as the importance of cleaning spills and stains. If something is done
incorrectly, or the supervisor notices a consistent problem, he or she will hold a special meeting
to discuss this, as well.
One problem the Vice President noted is controlling the high rate of absenteeism. Employees are
told to call if they are unable to work, but often they fail to call ahead of time, particularly if the
manager and supervisor "do not have good control over and rapport with the workers". They
have developed a variety of strategies for dealing with this. If several employees are missing
from one place, they often shuffle the workers around, assigning people to other jobs or
postponing special cleaning work to first complete the daily tasks. Sometimes they "divert"
members of special crews to places where cleaners are short. The supervisors generally are
responsible for moving cleaners around to make sure there are enough of them doing the work,
coordinating the shuffle through their Nextel phones.
Service Cleaning has also adopted a more systematic approach to avoiding the pitfalls of a
constantly fluctuating workforce. They first check absenteeism rates at each building:
"If a building with twenty people has a ten percent rate of absenteeism, we schedule twenty-two people to
work there, and we expect the supervisors to utilize those people. Around the 495 area, sometimes the
weather gets bad, and more people can't show up. So, if you have a twenty person building with twenty
percent absenteeism, we'll schedule twenty-four. A smart supervisor knows how to control this."
The Vice President acknowledged that most of the larger companies would stick to the budgeted
hours regardless of how many workers regularly showed up. The result is more pressure on the
workers who do come that day to do extra work to make up for the missing person. This
confirms the stories told by employees of other unionized firms I interviewed, who were
regularly asked to do the work of the two or three members of their team who had not shown up.
None of the Service Cleaning employees felt this was a problem, which indicates that
management is probably doing a good job of keeping enough people on each assignment.
Overall, the Vice President of Service Cleaning feels maintaining control is extremely important
to managing a successful commercial cleaning firm:
"It's important to always have some way to keep an eye on employees, to make sure they're doing their
job like you expect them to do it. If you leave them alone in a building, which sometimes might happen in
a smaller place, they think, the company won't know I'm out, so they may arrange their own schedule.
With no control over the workers, if you assign people to a building, they may make their own
determination about how much to get paid. Maybe they'll leave an hour early, maybe they'll work twice
as hard. But we told the customer, he'll be there from six to ten. If you let them make the adjustment
themselves, this falls back into a problem because the worker can determine their own value. We try to
make sure the supervisors keep an eye on them, so this doesn't happen. Because if the customer sees this
happening, another company will come in that is more strict and controls their workers better. It's a
delicate balance, how we represent ourselves, how we sell the service to the customer. We don't overmanage, but it's important to point out the details. The cleaners are good, but they could always be better.
You need to convey a sense of urgency and importance to the work. You paint a picture of importance:
they don't decide how the work is done, you decide"
Like Maids, Inc., Service Cleaning is committed to providing a consistent product. Their success
depends on being able to assure the customer that they are getting a pre-packaged set of services,
and deviation from this risks the reputation of the company.
Also similar to Maids, Inc., workers seem to be able to circumvent the rules. Service Cleaning
employees feel their job is governed by a set of standard procedures, but that they have a great
deal of leeway to decide how they are going to accomplish the necessary tasks. There is,
however, more possibility of oversight in a company that regularly inspects the work of its
cleaners. One worker at Service Cleaning feels that supervision remains tight, particularly for
workers known as "troublemakers". He always tries to clean by the books so they will have no
excuse to discipline him.
The majority of workers at other unionized cleaning companies, including coop members,
described a process whereby they were subjected to extensive oversight during their first few
months on the job, giving way to little or no oversight. One cleaning worker observed,
"At the beginning, when I started working there, they told me what to do and how to do it. They trained
me in how they wanted me to clean the office. Now they don't say anything. This work is good because I
can clean how I want, they leave me alone. No one is looking over your shoulder, or anything like that."
Most value this autonomy, citing it as a major advantage of doing cleaning work. One worker I
interviewed is responsible for cleaning a small office building by herself. For her, there is no
oversight - if there are no complaints, they leave her alone. She does not necessarily enjoy her
job, but feels that it was better than most because of this freedom to work at her own pace.
Several coop members noted that the quality of the work they do for these firms is not very high
because there is not much oversight, and no one has an incentive to do a good job.
Two of the workers interviewed feel supervision is quite strict at their firm, and that they are
constantly being told what to do and how to do it. One likened his position to that of a slave.
Even the coop members who feel there is little direct oversight in their jobs at unionized cleaning
firms spoke negatively of their relationships with supervisors and managers. As noted earlier,
they had chosen to join the cooperative because they were tired of being told what to do and
wanted to be their own bosses. Union representatives confirmed that there is a great deal of
variation among the different firms in how they treat their workers. A lot of the problems come
down to the relationship between the supervisor and the cleaners, but different firms have
different levels of "professionalism" which influences expectations and norms within the firm.
They feel Service Cleaning is very good at maintaining high standards that "trickle down"
through the ranks.
Administration of Service Cleaning is left to the members of the management team, who make
all decisions concerning pricing, customer mix, and financial planning. Because it is a unionized
cleaning firm, workers are able to exercise some control over wages, benefits, and work
conditions through the union. If a cleaner feels she has been disciplined or fired unjustly, she can
call their union representative who will investigate the problem, and then work with management
and the worker to resolve it. The union holds regular meetings with employees to inform them of
their rights, and if someone is interested in being more involved in the union he or she can
become a shop steward.
Union representation is a more indirect form of worker participation in decision-making than a
cooperative provides, but it gives workers a level of voice and protection not available at maid
service companies or other non-union firms. However, only two of the twelve employees I spoke
with had ever had any contact with SEIU, and both were referred to me by union representatives.
Others knew they had a union, and were aware that the it helped them to have higher wages, but
their interest in union activities ended there.
Alicia
Alicia has almost complete control over how she organizes her work and her business. She is
constrained, of course, by requests and particularities of clients, as well as by the need to make
enough to live on. But overall, she feels she is able to decide when she wants to work, whom she
wants to work for, and how she cleans a house. Customers trust her to do a good job, even
giving her their keys when they will not be home. If she needs to change her schedule for any
reason, they are always accommodating. She feels this flexibility is a major advantage of
working for herself. The other independent I interviewed also expressed appreciation for the
flexibility his job gives him, but tempers this with the observation that he is always closely
watched by the woman whose house he cleans.
The amount of control independent workers have over their jobs varies, as do most aspects of
their working conditions. Ehrenreich notes that the work can take various forms, from the well
paid free-lancer, "a veritable aristocrat of labor" often viewed as a friend or treated as "one of the
family"; to cases of forced labor in private households by servants brought to the United States
by their employers. The most common problem employees face in this work environment,
regardless of the market for housework in which they find themselves, is that of the "peculiar
intimacy of the employer-employee relationship" in which the work conditions are defined by the
idiosyncrasies of the home owner (2000, p.64).
Differences in how much control independent house cleaners feel they possess may relate to their
alternatives. Mary Romero, in her study of domestic workers in El Paso, finds that for the
women she interviewed, cleaning houses provided a great deal more autonomy and less direct
supervision than other employment options available to them:
"In comparison with other jobs they had held, domestic service usually paid more and offered greater
flexibility in arranging the length of the work-day and work-week. Although other jobs did not carry the
stigma of servitude, workers were under constant supervision, and the work was similarly low-status.
Therefore, the women who chose domestic service over other low-paying, low-status jobs based their
selection on the occupation that offered some possibility of control.... Throughout the interviews, the
women emphasized job flexibility as the major advantage of domestic service over previous jobs" (1992,
p.13).
Romero sees this control as something house cleaners have had to struggle for, however, rather
than as a natural characteristic of the work. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, she writes,
housework was increasingly rationalized to resemble scientific management principles.
"The application of scientific management was based on the model of capitalism - domestics being
workers and mistresses being administrators. Middle-class women attempted to subject domestics to
many of the same forms of control as factory workers, including the standardization of work procedures
and speedups. Domestics were reduced to unskilled labor and subjected to constant supervision" (1992,
p.56).
She feels the move toward day work rather than live-in domestic service has been a major step
toward improved autonomy and working conditions. Many of the Chicana cleaning workers
Romero interviewed were engaged in an ongoing struggle to build greater control and flexibility
into their jobs through defining themselves as professional house cleaners, establishing contracts
specifying tasks, minimizing contact with employers, and creating a small business-like
environment (1992, p.147).
Alicia seems to have adopted a strategy likewise intended to define her job as that of a small
business owner rather than a worker in the informal economy. She has neatly printed cards with
the name of her "business" and a series of bullet points advertising "Experienced with
References" and "Free Estimates" to the potential customer. Control over work by independent
house cleaners is thus in part connected to their ability to define their role in an employer's
house. Cooperatives and maid service companies accomplish this role delineation by connecting
the worker to a business that promises to provide a stable and consistent set of services. The
trade-off workers face is some loss of individual autonomy to the company. Independents may
be able to both professionalize their work and secure a high level of control, but this depends on
personal strategies of presentation and negotiation. It also requires access to a network of
employers willing to trust an individual not connected to a brand name company or a local nonprofit organization.
Summary
Control over the work process and over the administration of the company varies among the four
cases. After conversations with managers at Maids, Inc. and Service Cleaning, I expected to find
a tightly controlled system in place; both made it sound like they had effectively "Taylorized"
cleaning work, subjecting it to principles of scientific management. This was not, however,
always the case, as monitoring is costly and difficult in the homes and office buildings to which
these workers are assigned. The freedom of employees of Maids, Inc. to determine how they will
clean depends on their own defiance of the rules, but flexibility of hours and a certain level of
autonomy is built into their jobs as well. Service Cleaning employees work within a rigid
structure, but are able to achieve some amount of independence within that structure. They also
are represented by a union that works to incorporate their interests into administrative decisions.
Independent house cleaning, or even ownership of a small business like Maids, Inc., may offer
more control than any of the other work arrangements: Alicia and the owner of a Maids, Inc.
franchise both have a great deal of say in all aspects of their work and the management of their
businesses. This may not apply to all independent house cleaners, who lack a formal structure to
protect them from abuses by individual employers. These options are also not available to all
cleaning workers, who may lack the networks and English skills to clean independently, and the
capital to start a legitimate cleaning firm.
Eco-cleaning thus provides a combination of control over the work process and control over
business administration which is unusual in this industry and of value to the members. Control
and ownership are the first things they cite as advantages of working for their company. When
comparing their experiences at Eco-cleaning to those at other cleaning jobs, the difference that
stands out is that in the cooperative they are able to make decisions they were not allowed to
make before: "There we have to listen to what the supervisors tell us. Here we are our own
supervisors." Flexibility is also greater, as they have no fixed hours and no fear of getting fired if
they must cancel or reschedule.
This control does not come without a price. Conflicts with the manager, unpaid responsibilities,
and negative impacts of individual freedom on business success all may accompany this
increased autonomy. The coop members obviously are willing to make these trade-offs, at least
in the short term, in the hopes that the worst of their problems will be resolved with time and
effort. For them, the benefits continue to outweigh the costs. However, not all cleaning workers
will make this cost benefit calculation: several interviewees were not at all interested in owning
their own firm, or taking on the extra time commitment and uncertainty ownership entails. This
difference in preferences should be taken into account when considering how to design programs
and policy to improve employment outcomes for low-wage workers.
4. Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction is difficult to measure, or even to discuss in a coherent manner. Essentially, all
of the outcomes I have presented relate to satisfaction: wages and benefits, opportunities for
training and advancement, and control over work and over administrative decisions are important
in defining the level of satisfaction workers feel in their job. A comparison of each of these
outcomes thus presents a partial answer to what people value about their jobs, why they value
these things, and how this differs across different work arrangements.
In this section, I introduce an additional set of findings that more directly concern individual
attitudes toward cleaning work. In each interview, I asked workers a series of questions about
why they did this work, whether they enjoyed it and why, whether they liked their current job,
how this job compared to other cleaning jobs they had held, and how it compared to their jobs in
their home country. My conclusions do not break down well by each of the four cases. Instead I
found four different kinds of attitudes expressed by workers, three of which do not correspond
closely with a particular work arrangement. I present these below, and then look at how
cooperative ownership might influence the one aspect of job satisfaction I found to be unique of
Eco-cleaning members.
Cleaning work as short-term, unpleasant work
Three cleaning workers at unionized firms told me they are doing cleaning work because they do
not have any other options right now, and that they plan to move on to a better job once they
learn English or save up enough money to go to school. These workers are all recent arrivals,
and come from diverse backgrounds. One had worked in a health clinic in the Dominican
Republic and wants to become certified as a nurse. Another had just finished five years in
college in the Dominican Republic studying bank commerce, and feels frustrated that she was
unable to get a better job:
"Here I feel impotent, unable to do what I studied for, because I do not speak English. A lot of doors are
closed for me because of this, which is too bad, because I spent a lot of time and money on the university,
getting a degree. And here, I am cleaning, my God."
She told me that once she learned English, she will have many more options.
A third worked in factories for years in El Salvador, and then owned a small business there. He
is in an ESL class and plans on "making it" in the United States, which he sees as a country with
a great many opportunities for those who want to work hard. All three of these workers have
been in the U.S. for under two years, are in their twenties, and feel cleaning is as good a job as
they can get with poor language skills. This attitude did not seem to be connected to the type of
firm employing the worker, but rather their short length of stay, their youth, and their lack of the
responsibilities, such as children, that older workers see as a constraint on their options.
Cleaning work as long-term, unpleasant work
Ten of the seventeen cleaning workers interviewed agree that cleaning work is undesirable, but
feel it is inevitable that they will continue to do it. They are to be found in each of the four
cleaning arrangements, are older, and have added responsibilities, such as kids, that they
acknowledge are barriers to taking the time to get additional training or to learn English. One
independent house cleaner who had worked for Service Cleaning for thirteen years answered my
question of why he did cleaning work:
"Because I needed a job when I came to this country, and a friend found me a job at [Service Cleaning].
It was a good job because it paid, and I have to feed my family first, that's the most important thing. All
jobs here are bad. In my country [the Dominican Republic], when I owned my own store, that was a good
job, but I can't do that kind of job here. All the jobs I can get here are bad jobs... In Santo Domingo, I
was my own supervisor. Here, I am the slave of supervisors. In my country I am free, here I am a slave.
That is the big difference."
These cleaners generally feel there are no opportunities to move up within their firm, or to get a
better job in the future. They basically feel stuck, and do not think there is much they can do
about it.
Cleaning work as good work
Four of the workers I interviewed genuinely like cleaning work, including one coop member, two
Maids, Inc. employees, and Alicia. Some cleaners who acknowledged that they do not like
cleaning agree with this bunch that the work is often flexible and better than the alternatives. But
these four workers expressed a certain satisfaction with the work itself: they are helping to make
lives easier for people, and feel the job they do is important. Several said that they like going
into a really dirty house and whipping it into shape, seeing some concrete improvement at the
end of the job.
One of the women who expressed this view speaks perfect English, has a college degree, and has
held a variety of jobs, including working for the EPA in Boston and running a transportation and
painting business out of her house. She decided to work for Maids, Inc. because she wanted to
work a flexible job with a steady pay check. Though she complained about some of the
customers, overall she liked the work:
"Sometimes I think, why am I doing this? I hate telling people I'm doing cleaning work for a living. But
why not? They need the help, I think of it like that. Some people just don't like cleaning, and I do.
Sometimes I tell my kids, I wish I had someone to clean my house when I was working, raising you. This
way I get to help other people out when they have too many other things to do. They usually appreciate
it."
Notably, all of the workers who fall into this category are women and all clean houses. The
connection with their customers and the satisfaction of leaving a "clean house" are not part of the
office cleaning experience. None of these workers believe that their job is a ticket to higher
earnings or status, however, and most acknowledged that the work continues to carry a certain
stigma that they do not like.
Cleaning work as a step on the path to a better job
Only the members of Eco-cleaning expressed the belief that the cleaning work they are doing is
helping them to progress, or to move toward a better job. They have different feelings about how
good the actual work is, which fall somewhere in the range presented above. When speaking
about their other cleaning jobs, they fit squarely in one of these other three categories. But none
of them see their job at Eco-cleaning as a dead end, or as something they are settling for until
they are able to get a better job. This perception of mobility was already discussed as part of
improved opportunities for advancement and training. It is also a significant element of overall
job satisfaction, which contrasts with the other attitudes I found toward cleaning work and its
role in the lives of the workers.
The first day I began working with cooperative members on an evaluation of their business, in
the Spring of 2000, we reviewed the members' motivation for starting the cooperative. They had
given a variety of answers two years earlier: "to be our own boss, to work without exploitation
and abuses from a boss, to help others, to build a better future, and to create more work with
more money for the workers." Their current motivations echoed these themes, with a more sober
view to the difficulties they were facing: "the positive attitude of the group, to aspire towards a
better future, to correct the mistakes of the past, the strength and the ambition of the workers, and
the act of coordinating and solving problems together." The members expressed a desire to
create a better future for the members of their group, but also to create a successful company that
would provide better opportunities for others.
I have found over the course of the time I have worked with these members, now more than a
year, that the business does mean all of these things to them and that they are committed to
making it succeed. The meaning of cleaning work has been transformed in the context of this
small business; it is now an opportunity to build something better for themselves through their
labor. They express a sense of ownership, and a feeling of satisfaction when the business
experiences growth or success. Members are quick to point out that they are owners and make
the decisions in the business. All but one work in another cleaning job, and all say they would
prefer to work full time for "their company." One member said to me, "This is a different kind
of job. I do the same work, and I do not want to do this work forever, but I feel better about it. I
feel like I will succeed if the business succeeds."
Other cleaning cooperatives have similar experiences. I spoke with one worker-owner of a Los
Angeles coop who explained to me that many people who join his coop do so because it provides
some opportunity to "progress", to build a better future for themselves doing the only work they
are able to do in this country:
"The idea of the cooperative is to help immigrants progress socially and economically. We know,
because we have experienced this, that immigrants arrive from their country, and have trouble finding
other kinds of jobs, so they do yard work, cleaning work, whatever people will pay them for. Some are
professionals, and had really good jobs in their country, but they can't get these kinds of jobs here. A
professional from another country may want to do good work, well-paying work, but he has trouble
paying for training or classes. He has a family, things he has to pay for. The idea of the cooperative is to
help these people move forward, to be able to realize their goals in this country doing the type of work
they are qualified to do here."
These workers find in cooperatives a different kind of cleaning job that provides more than just a
wage. Segmented labor market theory provides a way of thinking about the significance of this
shift in attitude, toward viewing a typically low status cleaning job as a source of opportunity and
prestige.
Two different markets for labor
Segmented labor market theorists argue that the economy is divided into two sectors that differ
systematically in the skill and training involved, job security and attachment, opportunities for
advancement, level of participation in decisions, and compensation. The primary labor market
contains jobs that require high levels of training, worker control, opportunities for upward
mobility and higher compensation. The secondary labor market, in contrast, contains low-wage,
dead-end jobs (Tilly and Tilly 1994, p.19).
Cleaning work is often associated with the secondary labor market, and the immigrants that hold
these jobs are assumed to encounter barriers that prevent them from moving into the primary
labor market. I have discussed what some of these barriers might be; most noticeably, language
and discrimination act to restrict mobility. Michael Piore emphasizes the temporary character of
the migration flow as a more systematic factor that determines the kinds of jobs immigrants have
access to, and the way these jobs are structured. He asserts that because many migrants believe
they will not remain in the United States, they regard work as instrumental, or as a means to
gather income to take back to their home communities (1979, p.55).
The decision of the immigrant workers I interviewed to do cleaning work and their tendency to
regard it as "instrumental" is not shaped by an intention to return home, but is strongly
influenced by their perception that they face a limited set of alternatives, and that none of these
alternatives conveys a particularly high status or provides them the possibility of achieving job
mobility. Piore's theoretical framework is helpful in that it provides a way of thinking about job
choice and job satisfaction as more than just a function of income. It points to why the shift in
meaning that occurs when a cleaning job becomes a means of attaining status and moving toward
a better position, rather than as just a means of making money, is significant. He writes, "To
understand labor market behavior, one must concentrate on the process through which people
develop the self-conceptions and social orientations that determine their job choices" (1979,
p.54). Cooperative ownership may be seen as a process which works a change on how the
members view their work as cleaners.
Segmented labor market theory locates cleaning work in a secondary sector of dead end, lowwage jobs. I have already shown that there may be benefits to cleaning work that make it
preferable to other low-wage jobs accessible to immigrants. Even the wage accompanying this
work may not be so low in places with strong unions and tight labor markets. Nonetheless,
barriers to mobility persist, and workers in all three of my comparison cases recognize that their
job provides few opportunities for them to move into a more desirable occupation.
The experiences of the members of Eco-cleaning point to how ownership of a cooperative
business might work to transform attitudes toward a typical secondary sector job. When
members say their job at Eco-cleaning is a good job, they express pride in ownership and
satisfaction with the skills they are learning. They also anticipate that their efforts in the
company will be rewarded in the future by increased earnings and status. These are all
implicated in the satisfaction they feel, and mark a sharp contrast with the attitudes expressed by
workers in other cleaning companies. The most decisive element of job satisfaction that
cooperative ownership may provide in the cleaning industry thus may be that it creates a layer of
meaning and status not normally associated with this kind of work. It may, in fact, make these
secondary sector jobs look a bit more like those in the primary sector, bridging a traditionally
wide gap between the two.
Summary
Job satisfaction is a tricky category to compare across workers, particularly when attempting to
analyze responses from a small sample of interviews. The conclusions I draw are two-fold.
First, there are different reasons immigrants do cleaning work. Most of the workers I
interviewed stumbled into cleaning because it was the best job they felt they could get with poor
English skills, and because they knew someone who could get them a job with a good company.
There is some variation, however, as to whether they view this work as short-term or long-term,
and whether they actually enjoy the work itself.
This points to the need to take the differences among these attitudes into account when devising
policies or programs intended to improve outcomes for cleaning workers. Those who are recent
arrivals, and eager to learn enough English to move out of cleaning work, stand to benefit from
training programs that will help them to progress in that direction. Because there are forces that
seem to keep many of these workers in the cleaning industry, one of which may actually be
preference for this kind of work, it is important to support unionization efforts and other
campaigns that seek to give a representative voice to cleaners and improve compensation for
their work.
A second conclusion I draw is that cooperative ownership may in fact serve to transform a
typically dead end job in the secondary labor market into a higher status job with opportunities
for training and mobility. This finding points to the importance and uniqueness of cooperative
ownership as a strategy to improve low-wage jobs. Cooperatives are not for everybody, attested
to by the differences in attitudes toward cleaning work and toward the desirability of owning a
business. They do, however, hold the potential to improve some of the most persistently
negative aspects of the work for those whose options are limited to jobs in the secondary sector.
Business strategy and success
Cooperatives provide a range of positive employment outcomes for their members, from
increased control and flexibility to improved training opportunities, mobility, and status. These
benefits are not without trade-offs and ambiguities, but the members of Eco-cleaning and other
cooperative cleaning businesses seem to feel it is possible to resolve the most unpleasant of these
trade-offs in their favor. Before concluding that cooperatives are a good target for investment of
community economic development dollars, however, it is important to take a step back and
evaluate whether they hold promise as sustainable, self-sufficient enterprises. If coops provide
great jobs that have to be subsidized for years, the range of benefits I have listed may not be
enough to justify their establishment. If there are sharp limits to the scale these experiments can
achieve, this might also leave room to doubt the wisdom of investing heavily in cooperative
ownership.
In this final section, I will take a closer look at the business strategies used by Eco-cleaning and
other cleaning cooperatives, as well as their successes and failures. I will then look at strategies
used by Maids, Inc., Service Cleaning, and Alicia to understand any advantages and
disadvantages cooperatives may have competing with more mainstream cleaning companies and
with independent house cleaners. The experiences of these other coops and businesses point to
changes cleaning cooperatives can implement to become more competitive. They also point to
obstacles that may be difficult for coops to surmount.
Eco-cleaning
When Eco-cleaning was established, the sponsoring CDC anticipated that the business would tap
into the growing demand for house cleaning services detailed in Chapter 3, eventually cleaning
office spaces, as well. Market conditions looked good, with increasing numbers of professional
households moving to the neighborhood. The business also would have features that would
allow it to serve a solid niche market, giving it a competitive advantage over the seven other
house cleaning companies already located in the area. These included non-toxic cleaning
methods and products; competitive pricing, high quality performance, and flexible scheduling;
cooperative structure; and local ownership. The neighborhood is known as a place that draws
artists and others who hold "alternative values", and so it seemed likely they would be able to tap
into potential demand for a different, more environmentally- and community-friendly kind of
cleaning service.
The business plan has not exactly been realized. Eco-cleaning has, indeed, been able to
capitalize on its image to find and keep some customers. The majority of responses to a
customer survey indicated "strong satisfaction" with the cleaning products. Several customers
wrote comments about how glad they were to support such a good business committed to a
healthy community and environment. Eco-cleaning has not, however, been able to develop the
substantial base of housecleaning customers within the neighborhood originally anticipated. The
causes probably include some initial problems delivering a quality service and insufficient
advertising and visibility. They have also been steadily increasing their number of commercial
clients, preferring the comparative ease of the work and consistency of the contract.
Eco-cleaning has been steadily growing since it was established three years ago. It experienced
40 percent growth during its first year, and around 60 percent growth in the last two years. This
is commendable, but falls far short of projections when the company was established: revenues
totaled $105,000 last year compared to projected revenues of $275,000. The business has not
been able to make a profit, and often has experienced losses. Members did not get paid for
several months due to insufficient funds to cover expenses, and their paychecks remain backed
up several months: this month, April, they were paid for work they did in February.
The cooperative currently charges a base rate of $17.50 per hour per person for cleaning services,
half the price of hiring a Maids, Inc. team. Each member is paid $10, and each employee is paid
$8. So, between $7.50 and $9.50 goes to the company for other expenses. These include the
manager's salary of $10 an hour for 20 to 25 hours of work a week, liability insurance, worker's
compensation, phone, advertising, supplies, taxes, and loan interest payments. These costs
currently exceed revenues, indicating a need to either charge more or find some way to cut costs.
Members have discussed strategies to reduce costs with the manager and CDC staff, but are
having difficulty figuring out just where they would achieve these savings. The manager feels
there is nothing more they can cut; they are currently operating at the minimum. The business
continues to rely on the CDC for office space and the unpaid time staff spend facilitating
meetings and assisting with finances.
There is also an ongoing discussion about how the business can improve its pricing structure.
All the members I interviewed feel that getting the price right is a big challenge, and would like
to see it raised. Several mentioned some resistance by the manager and CDC staff to charging a
higher price, and feel frustrated that they are the owners yet are unable to change this. There is
also agreement that the contracts should be structured differently for different clients, because
office work is easier and more constant than house cleaning work. Sometimes the manager
underestimates the time it takes to clean a space, which results in underpayment, as well. Or he
overestimates, and if members leave early, customers are angry that they did not get what they
paid for.
The manager feels they are beginning to improve pricing and scheduling. Eco-cleaning now
advertises a minimum charge of $35 an hour for two people, leaving him room to negotiate for a
higher price. Sometimes he is able to charge a higher rate for more difficult or far away jobs. He
says they now charge up to $87.50 for two people to clean for two hours, or $21.87 per person
per hour, which significantly exceeds the base rate of $17.50 per person per hour. This price
already seems high enough to his customers, and he is hesitant to raise it further. Offices and
commercial spaces are all charged by the job, based on the size of the space. Because these
spaces are secured through a competitive bidding process, the profit margins are usually lower.
There are problems with the timing of the jobs, as well. Because each client is scheduled at a
particular hour, there may be too much or too little time between them, resulting in either
tardiness or wasted time sitting around waiting for the next job to begin. The manager feels it is
important to their customers that they maintain a schedule where they commit to being at a job at
a certain time. With houses, there may be more flexibility, but as they are moving toward more
commercial spaces, they have to be able to be there when they are needed.
Improving pricing and scheduling are important goals. However, a more basic challenge for
Eco-cleaning is to achieve the necessary scale needed to make a profit: most of their costs are
fixed, and more customers are needed to cover these costs and still have enough left over to pay
the workers. There is a constant push and pull between the manager and the workers around the
issue of securing more contracts and finding the people to do the work. They currently are
cleaning 18 to 19 commercial spaces and 10 to 12 houses regularly, and their goal is to increase
the number of commercial spaces. To secure residential clients, they advertise in the local paper
and phone book, and distribute flyers in several Boston neighborhoods. The manager is
responsible for finding new commercial clients through contacts and referrals, but is unable to
devote a great deal of time to this due to his limited hours and multiple responsibilities. Workers
have discussed hiring someone to help them secure new contracts; however, the manager feels
that unless the members are willing to give up their other jobs to devote more time to the
company, or to pay more than $8 to employees, they will not be able to service them. These are
all issues that are raised in meetings and were discussed during interviews, and they are slowly
being improved upon.
Other cooperatives have experienced varying levels of business success. Five of the nine coops
surveyed are profitable, and one breaks even. All of the three cooperatives that are experiencing
losses have been in existence for under three years. Four are independent from their sponsoring
organization, with the most common form of ongoing support free office space and free or
subsidized staff time.
Prices charged by the coops for cleaning services vary, from $30 to $10 per person per hour, with
an average and median of $22. Most coops charge customers at least $10 more than their hourly
wage; one charges $23 more than each cleaner's wage. Those cooperatives that have been able
to pay very high wages and benefits have been successful at targeting a niche market of
customers willing to pay a premium for a different kind of cleaning service. The managers of the
two coops that are managed in a more traditionally top-down manner feel they compete on the
basis of price and quality rather than on their image as a coop. Their wages are $8 an hour, but
they distribute profits at the end of the year to members. One manager observed, "Basically,
we're just like any other business, from the point of view of our customers. Maybe they know
we are more fair to our cleaners, but we have to be out there with a competitive bid for a job just
like anyone else." This is similar to the experience of the manager of Eco-cleaning, who does
not feel they get any preference for commercial bids, and must compete on the basis of price.
One rather interesting market niche two coops are attempting to enter is the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development's "Healthy Homes Initiative". This initiative is targeted at
reducing lead based paint and other health hazards in affordable housing. The property owner
applies for a loan or grant to update their building in accordance with the new standards. During
the six months it takes to process the request, house cleaning companies that have gone through a
special training are contracted to do remediation work. This provides coop members with a stable
government contract that pays more than standard cleaning jobs.
Most of the cooperatives have had to deal with the problem of accurately estimating the time it
will take to clean a space, as well as differences among clients. The most common strategy
developed is one of flexible pricing and timing. One non-profit staff person who handled
estimates for several years at one coop described the negotiation process:
"The first time, we charge $10 or $20 more: we say, it's the first cleaning, so we're going to whip this
place into shape. Depending on the frequency, we charge a lower rate per visit. We tell them, we quote
per job rather than per hour, because they'll be able to whip through the job after a few times at the house.
We say to the customer up front, your place will get cleaned for $50 every time, regardless of how long it
takes to clean it. Look, Maria is really fast, she can probably whip through this place in an hour. If Susana
comes, and is a slow-poke, will you want to pay more? The bottom line is, this is a $50 job. We don't
want to punish you, the customer, and I'm sure you want to reward someone who's better on the job. An
average housecleaner will get this done in 5 hours, and that's why you're paying $50. If they've had a
party, and expect you to clean vomit from toilet, that's extra, we state that up front. I usually talk very
fast, and convince them that this is the best way for them."
Others describe a similar process of charging a variable rate based on different kinds of jobs.
Several tell clients a "ball park range" for when they will arrive to clean the house so that they
can build in more flexibility in the timing of the jobs. Again, this does not work with offices,
which require more rigid scheduling.
The problem of attracting good employees was noted as a problem by only a few of the coops.
Several operate as LLCs specifically so that they can include undocumented workers among their
ranks. Part of their mission is to improve employment opportunities for these groups, whose
options are sharply limited. One coop manager noted problems keeping workers lured by the
possibility of taking customers and leaving the coop, pocketing all of the money paid for their
work. All but one offer earnings mobility, and most allow workers to start becoming members
either right away or after six months to give them an added incentive to stay with the company.
These experiences point to several lessons for Eco-cleaning. First, successfully targeting a niche
market is important to ensuring above average wages and benefits. House cleaning remains the
best realm to cash in on the cooperative image, but it may be possible to participate in
government programs, as well, such as HUD's Healthy Homes Initiative. Probably the best
strategy is to clean a mix of houses and offices, with different pricing structures for each.
Second, a larger proportion of each contract should probably be allocated to the company.
Preferably, this would be accomplished by raising rates rather than by lowering benefits. Third,
flexible scheduling and pricing holds potential for reducing friction with customers and
rewarding workers for skill and speed. And finally, developing retention incentives for new
workers is important for the growth and success of the company. A look at the three other cases
will help to expand on these recommendations and to better understand how businesses that do
not explicitly target a "socially conscious" niche market compete in the cleaning industry.
Maids, Inc.
Maids, Inc. is part of a large and successful national chain of maid service franchises. There are
a number of these corporate cleaning chains, which now control 25 to 30 percent of the $1.4
billion housecleaning business (Ehrenreich, 2000 p.64). These companies are "booming":
Ehrenreich writes, "Merry Maids claimed to be growing at 15 to 20 percent a year in 1996, and
spokesmen for both Molly Maids and The Maids International told me that their firms' sales are
growing by 25 percent a year" (2000, p.65).
The Maids, Inc. franchise I studied is doing quite well. The owner noted that they have
experienced "phenomenal growth", increasing their number of employees from six to twenty in
the three years he has owned the business. In the last year, sales averaged over $500,000, up ten
percent from the previous year. The franchise currently has around 270 clients: 19.5 percent are
weekly, 50.2 percent are biweekly, 6.7 percent are triweekly, 12.6 percent are on a four week
basis, and 11.1 percent are "special cleanings". The price charged for each client is based on an
estimate by the owner, his wife, or the manager. The considerations that guide this estimate are
similar to those used by the coops, including "how much trouble it seems the customer will be"
or how dirty the house is. The average price charged comes out to around $35 per person per
hour, twice the price charged by Eco-cleaning.
These revenues are distributed among a predictable range of expenses, with the largest proportion
going to wages: in the last two years, 25 to 30 percent of expenses were paid as wages to the
team mates and captains, with an additional 10 percent for "training wages". Other expenses
include general office expenses, mileage, supplies, taxes, advertising, business insurance, the
office manager's salary, and numerous other small expenses. Because they are part of a national
chain, they are also required to pay an 8 percent franchise fee to the central office. What is left
over is a pretty comfortable salary for the owner, which now averages13 percent of expenses, or
around $70,000 last year. They have sustained a profit of over $10,000 a year, which the owner
assures me reflects "small business profits," implying that some of the revenues have been sunk
into additional costs to produce a lower profit margin.
The strategy followed by the franchise owner to achieve this success draws heavily on the
experience, advice, and support of the Maids, Inc. national network. Their target market is 25 to
49 year old women with a median income of over $50,000. Each franchise has a protected
territory that no other Maids, Inc. franchise owner can infringe upon. There are three sizes of
franchise, noted earlier, which are based on the numbers of households making over $50,000 a
year. The smallest area contains under 5,000 such households, and the largest contains over
10,000 households.
Once an individual purchases the franchise, she receives eight days of training. She is also
assigned a "buddy": a successful owner in the area who is there "to hold your hand through the
first year and help you with whatever problems you are having." The owner with whom I spoke
feels this was extremely valuable, as a first time business owner. "My buddies were the best, I
freaked out, but they were always a phone call away." Franchise owners have access to a Maids,
Inc. web site, with a special share board to help them with any problems they encounter. Maids,
Inc. also gives incentives to owners to increase sales, such as trips to various exotic foreign
places, and distributes regular tips, such as, "Emphasize quality by encouraging team members to
spend more time cleaning in the homes. A focus on quality now will justify that fee increase in
the spring."7
Marketing is handled through the corporate office, which runs television adds and maintains a
web site with a separate page for each franchise. A potential customer can enter their zip code
and the Maids, Inc. office closest to him or her is instantly displayed. The franchise sometimes
does direct mail coupons, but at this point, the majority of their business comes through referrals.
The problem of finding and keeping good employees willing to work for a fairly low wage is an
experience shared by Maids, Inc. and Eco-cleaning. The business puts ads in local papers, but
most employees come through referrals. "We've got cousins, brothers, all kinds of relatives and
friends working here." When asked about the most significant challenge for the business, the
owner replied:
"Human beings. Challenges are not market driven. There's a huge demand. The problem is not selling
the service, but delivering a good service consistently. It's a very hard job. The pay alone is not an
adequate incentive to stay. One thing [Maids, Inc.] does very well is to try to take care of employees and
family. We lend them money, fix their cars, ask them about their families. You try as best you can to give
a ****. You must care."
He has developed a creative set of incentives and strategies for making sure employees feel
valued by the company, show up on time, and do a good job. These include holiday parties,
rewards for good attendance, "Spanish Fridays" when the manager has to speak in Spanish and
the employees have to speak in English, and a slew of informal favors when employees are in a
bind. The owner sees his job as primarily one of managing people, which he acknowledges is a
challenge with the multiple pressures and constraints his employees face.
Other maid service companies advertise similar benefits for franchise owners, from training to
tip-trading. The model I observed appears to be typical of this industry. Ehrenreich observes
that many of these companies have difficulty attracting and retaining employees to these low
wage jobs in a tight labor market. "Some franchises have dealt with the tight labor market by
participating in welfare-to-work projects that not only funnel employees to them but often
subsidize their paychecks with public money" (2000, p.65).
There also seems to be a strong focus by the national Maids, Inc. office on the problem of worker
motivation. In one training video prepared for managers, "how to develop a more holistic
concept of our service workers" was discussed. Strategies were grouped into three categories:
how to motivate and serve the employee, how to develop standards and expectations based on
each employee's individual talents, and how to structure rewards to serve the employee's needs.
The business strategy and success of a cleaning company rests on the quality of service their
workers provide, but as a small business that pays low wages in a tight labor market, the problem
of motivation attains prominence.
Service Cleaning
Service Cleaning operates in a very different market from Maids, Inc. They contract with a
variety of different customers, including office buildings, office parks, institutions, government
buildings, and universities - basically, they target any commercial space they can clean within
the Boston area. Their system for estimating cost is complicated, but the average comes to $0.80
to $1.00 per square foot. This takes into account how many people it will take to do the work,
how difficult the work will be, and what kind of equipment is needed to do the cleaning.
Overall, around 78 percent of Service Cleaning's costs are payroll related, 6 to 7 percent is spent
on supplies, and the rest goes to other business expenses. A union representative quoted a
standard billed cost of $18 per hour per person, with $15 of that allocated to direct labor costs.
Service Cleaning's marketing strategy is based on building networks and personal contacts.
They do some advertising, sending out brochures with information about their business, but these
rarely pay off.
"Usually a new office building goes up, or someone wants to put out a bid, they'll invite, maybe, six
companies to come and bid the jobs. It's mostly by invitation or solicitation. I'll tell you, every time we
see an I-beam going up in town, we send them our materials, try to get in contact with them to let them
know we're interested in the job."
They usually have to find their customers. To get smaller contracts, they may call buildings near
those they are already cleaning, or leave flyers around an office park. The Vice President
emphatically assured me that, in this business, "it's all about who you know":
"This is really a personal contact business. It's all about talking to the right people, them getting to know
the company, meeting new people who can help you out.... If they're convinced you're of a size that can
handle a big contract, and professional enough to deliver the work, then they're likely to consider you.
It's hard for small businesses to get a foot in the door in this kind of environment, unless you know
someone."
Employee recruitment does not appear to be as difficult for Service Cleaning as it is for Ecocleaning and Maids, Inc. This is in part due to their size and visibility, as well as the composition
of their work force: the majority of the applications for employment are referred by people who
work there now. The Vice President observed, "We have six to ten people coming in every day.
You now, people who work here refer their friends, their relatives. Most of our employees are
now Spanish speaking, I would say, 80 to 85 percent, and they are always sending us new
people." There is also a labor pool at the union that they are able to tap into, and when they take
over a contract from another company, they have the option of retaining the work force that is
already at that building.
A major factor that draws and keeps employees (their turnover is around ten percent, contrasted
with 200 percent at Maids, Inc.) is the higher wage and benefits they offer. The Vice President
attributes the stability of their workforce to the union presence in Boston:
"We are able to provide good work conditions and ensure the customer that a third party, the union, is
involved to police wages and benefits. One problem we want to avoid is having a lot of different people
in different offices with different rates and standards, and no one knowing how much the employees were
being paid for their work. The workers don't like that, either, they don't trust it. I could sell the best
package, but if I didn't pay the going rate, I would have constant turnover. Those workers would have no
reason to stay. This is especially important during bad times when people are difficult to come by."
The strong union presence in Boston - currently 90 percent of the cleaning contracts in the city
are held by unionized firms - has helped to maintain this stability.
"Relationships with the employee are important. You have to make sure they know what's coming to
them. Some people might try to sell price rather than quality. Then the customer might say, wait, that guy
over there is paying $8, you're paying $9.40, and no matter what you pay, you get the same quality of
person. So controls are necessary. Someone's diligent, they work hard and earn a decent wage. Then
someone comes in, utilizes an illegal cleaning force, and their wages are being undercut. It's important to
crack down on these companies, and that's where the union comes in. The company and the industry must
be predictable, so everyone knows what they're getting and where they can go for help."
The relationship between the union and employers is not always so friendly, but union
representatives confirm that most companies feel it is in their interest to have a strong
organization policing the industry. Service Cleaning has been particularly cooperative, from
their perspective.
One union representative noted that maintaining high rates and wages is difficult in such a
competitive industry, where there are always non-unionized cleaning firms that pay workers $6
per hour and are able to easily out-bid unionized firms. The key to maintaining these rates has
been aggressive organizing and use of political power to pressure the government and private
firms to commit to union contracts. Conversations with several workers in unionized firms seem
to indicate that some employers are able to get around the high rates, hiring undocumented
workers off the books and paying them lower wages. The manager of Eco-cleaning feels that this
is standard practice, based on conversations with managers and supervisors at some of the larger
firms. He cites a labor shortage that made hiring these workers increasingly attractive.
Business success for a unionized firm thus rests on strong networks and a good reputation, as
well as reliance on a strong union that can keep wages out of competition in their market area. It
may also rest on a company's ability to circumvent the rules, charge low wages, and hire
undocumented workers. The success of the union may actually be a factor that makes finding
good workers difficult for cooperatives in Boston, whereas coops in Los Angeles are often able
to offer their members much better wages than they would otherwise be able to earn. The strong
union presence also means that it is possible for a firm that pays workers around $10 an hour to
compete in the Boston commercial cleaning market - the challenge is one of achieving the
necessary scale, efficiency, and, relationships.
Alicia
Alicia has built a successful one-woman business, which provides her with about forty hours of
work a week at $20 to $25 an hour. She has found her customers mostly through referrals, but
also advertises by leaving flyers at houses. She works primarily for wealthier households,
steadily finding more customers with bigger houses who want more frequent cleaning services.
Alicia sometimes cleans alone, but her husband often joins her to help out. If she has a lot of
customers one day, her sister will help, as well. She has thought about expanding her business
and hiring more people, but she worries about trusting someone she does not know very well in
customers' houses. "What they do would reflect on me, and I take a lot of pride in doing
everything just right."
Alicia attributes her success to how organized and neat she is with each house. She always
makes sure everything is perfect before leaving. She said she often gets referred to someone new
after doing a "first cleaning", because she takes so much time to clean every inch of someone's
house. This was confirmed by one pair of her customers who were reluctant to hire a house
cleaner until one of their friends told them, "you have to try this woman out, she's great."
It is difficult to say how typical Alicia's experience is of other independent cleaners. The growth
of each "business" is often limited by the personal contacts they are able to secure, as well as by
whether they have an interest in hiring additional people. The other independent I interviewed
cleans only one house regularly, and does not really want to clean more: he is just doing it for
extra money. The growth of this market for house cleaning bodes well for expanded
opportunities, but these opportunities may be limited by the increasing popularity of corporate
maid service companies and other more "legitimate" cleaning businesses. These offer customers
an intermediary that takes the uncertainty out of hiring an independent cleaner: "The maids'
wages, their Social Security taxes, their green cards, backaches, and child-care problems - all
these are the sole concern of the company" (Ehrenreich 2000, p.64). Independents will no doubt
continue to be an important segment of the house cleaning market, but will perhaps increasingly
need to offer customers the "professional" image Alicia seems to have been so successful at
fostering.
Summary
This tangle of strategies, challenges, and successes is useful in evaluating the potential of a
cooperative cleaning business to develop as a profitable enterprise. A comparison among the
four case studies point to several things cooperatives do well. They are able to target a "niche
market" of customers willing to pay more for a socially (and in a few cases environmentally)
conscious business. They may also be able to provide a higher quality service, by workers
motivated through either their ownership stake in the company or the possibility of becoming an
owner. A related advantage is a decreased need for monitoring in the work place, which
eliminates a layer of oversight relied upon by contract cleaning companies.
A comparison of business success across cleaning firms, however, gives reason to doubt that
cooperative ownership is the most efficient and profitable means of organizing a business in the
cleaning industry. If there are productivity gains, they are not being translated into high profits
and growth. This is probably due in part to the extremely small scale of these experiments, and in
part to the structure of these businesses: the time intensive process of participatory decisionmaking, the long time frame required to develop management skills among worker-members,
and the rather loose control over scheduling may limit efficiency and growth. This seems to be
supported by the observation that those cooperatives that are turning a high profit are managed in
a more typically hierarchical way. The experiences of other cleaning companies clarify the
disadvantages coops must overcome to improve their chances of "making it" in this industry.
When cooperatives are directly competing against maid service companies and unionized
contract cleaning companies, in markets that are not as responsive to their socially responsible
image, the strengths of these other businesses render them formidable competitors. First, both
Service Cleaning and Maids, Inc. benefit from size and name recognition, which help customers
to find them easily and to feel more confident they will receive a quality product. Second, both
firms are part of strong networks of other similar firms that provide each with a solid business
model, a set of "best practices", and industry standards. In the case of Maids, Inc., the network
of franchises to which they belong provides training materials, administrative assistance, and
other direct sources of help. Service Cleaning belongs to several industry associations that
diffuse best practices to their members. The union operates as another kind of association,
maintaining standards and reputability, and giving the contractors that are part of the collective
bargaining agreement a reason to communicate and collaborate.
Third, these firms have a great deal of flexibility in responding quickly to customer requests.
Centralized decision-making in both Maids Inc. and Service Cleaning facilitates moving workers
among different jobs, which is important in an industry that relies on delivering a consistent and
predictable service when it is requested. The manager of Eco-cleaning acknowledges that his
lack of flexibility in scheduling the members is one of his biggest obstacles to finding and
keeping clients. Finally, both firms have highly motivated and experienced management teams.
The high pay, status, and authority vested in the managers at these companies no doubt helps to
secure and keep these individuals.
There are some high hurdles Eco-cleaning must cross if it wishes to provide its members the
benefits of good wages, opportunities for training and mobility, and control in the context of a
profitable business. Perhaps these goals cannot be reconciled, necessitating certain trade-offs.
Several cooperatives have traded some worker control over decision-making for greater
flexibility in meeting customer demands. Others have kept membership and profit margins low,
but have managed to retain worker voice and to provide a high salary for members. There are
certainly lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of these other coops. I have
already discussed the benefits to be gained from targeting a niche market, adopting flexible
scheduling and pricing, and developing incentives for new workers. Perhaps the most valuable
thing the older of these cooperatives have to teach a younger business is that success is
attainable, but may entail compromises of either size and growth potential or high levels of
member participation and control.
The successful business practices adopted by cooperative and non-cooperative firms may
translate into changes Eco-cleaning and other upstart cooperative cleaning businesses can
implement to improve their chances of competing. In the final chapter, I will conclude with a
series of recommendations that incorporate "lessons learned" from those practices that are
compatible with the cooperative model of business organization.
Conclusions
This comparison of employment outcomes and business success across four different cleaning
firms tells a mixed story about the potential of cooperative business development to improve
cleaning jobs. On the one hand, these cooperatives provide a range of benefits, unique in their
form and scope, to the worker-members that participate in them. While wages and benefits are
not always higher, members are able to enjoy a great deal of control, and are provided with
opportunities for training and mobility they are unlikely to find in other cleaning jobs. The
perception of mobility and status members associate with their work in the cooperatives also
contribute to a sense of satisfaction with their job that I did not find in the other workers I
interviewed.
These are not unqualified benefits, and may require a high level of investment by a sponsoring
organization. Recognizing the existence of these positive outcomes is, however, useful as a
guide for other programs and campaigns to improve cleaning work, and points to a positive role
cooperatives may play in these campaigns. Cooperative cleaning businesses provide an option
for workers who are willing to trade some of their time and job security for the benefits coops
offer. They also hold the possibility of transforming cleaning work from a dead-end, low status
job to one with opportunities for earnings and status mobility.
On the other hand, there are a number of factors that limit cooperative profitability and growth.
These must be overcome if the development and support of cleaning cooperatives is to be
justified as a potentially successful community economic development strategy. In most cases
these jobs must be subsidized for a number of years, and are able to extend their benefits only to
a small group of workers. Around 150 workers nation-wide are benefiting from those
cooperatives I was able to locate; most have between ten and fifteen members. This compares to
over 2 million workers nationally employed as janitors and cleaners, and almost 1 million
employed as maids and housekeeping cleaners. The problems they face are not insurmountable,
but will often require a sustained investment of time and resources in a small group of workers.
The establishment and support of cooperative cleaning businesses is thus best seen as a part of
the puzzle of how to improve low-wage house and office cleaning jobs. It is a part that takes the
goals of community economic development to heart and is able to achieve some of them, albeit at
a limited scale. These findings point to the need for strategies that seek to create stronger, more
successful cooperatives. They also, however, make a case for other forms of intervention that
address more broadly the problems and struggles of cleaning workers. I will conclude with a set
of recommendations that attempt to meet both concerns.
Chapter 5
Conclusions and Recommendations
Community economic development strategies take on a variety of forms, all of which are based
in a commitment to enhancing the range of social and economic goods available to a group of
people located in a place. Cooperative businesses have a great deal in common with the other
programs and initiatives that have grown out of this approach. Local ownership, an emphasis on
training and advancement, and a focus on the structure and distribution of power within lowwage jobs are all incorporated within the ideal cooperative into a neat, consistent package.
Cooperative supporters take the goals of community development to heart, adding a clear
directive as to just how these goals may best be accomplished: through supporting enterprises
characterized by a fundamentally different structure of ownership and control. Worker-owned
cooperatives, they argue, promote equity, improve productivity, provide more satisfying work
experiences, and ensure that a business will be more strongly committed to the goals and needs
of others living in the community. The seeming comprehensiveness of these arguments in the
face of somewhat ambiguous evidence leads to questions of just how these benefits play out
within a living, breathing cooperative business. Might there be trade-offs among these benefits?
What value do workers place on each of these various benefits? Does the cooperative structure
work well in certain industries, and not so well in others?
These questions have run through my comparison of employment outcomes and business success
in four cleaning firms. Hearing about, participating in, and observing the work process and the
business structure of these firms have led me to several conclusions about the problems and
promise of cooperative business development as a strategy to improve jobs in the cleaning
industry.
1. Cleaning cooperatives do improve cleaning work for their members
Cleaning cooperatives provide a unique set of benefits to worker-members that they have
difficulty finding in other cleaning jobs. Opportunities for training and mobility, control over the
work process and the organization of the business, and job satisfaction are present to varying
degrees in the other businesses I studied. The form and substance of these positive outcomes in a
coop are unusual, however, and of value to its members.
2. Cleaning cooperatives face a number of obstacles
These positive outcomes may be great for the workers who participate in cooperatives, but they
are limited to a few scattered experiments, all operating at a fairly small scale. These coops face
a number of obstacles to successfully competing in the house and office cleaning industry,
including their limited size and difficulty gaining access to networks and information. Some of
their strengths may also be their weaknesses: democratic control over decision-making may limit
their flexibility in responding to customer requests and their ability to attract experienced
management. These are not insurmountable problems, but overcoming them often requires a
substantial investment of time and resources. Organizations interested in organizing a
cooperative cleaning business should carefully weigh the costs and benefits with this in mind.
3. Cleaning cooperatives are not a panacea
While cooperatives are great for some cleaning workers, they are not necessarily a solution to all
of the problems and struggles house and office cleaners face. Immigrants end up in these jobs for
a variety of reasons, and strategies to improve cleaning work must take differences in preferences
and goals into account. Maid service companies, large janitorial firms, and independent house
cleaners will continue to do a majority of the cleaning work in this country. Campaigns by
unions and other organizations to improve wages and working conditions in traditional work
places, as well as training programs that help these workers learn English and acquire marketable
skills, are still important parts of efforts to improve employment outcomes in these industries
more broadly. Coops should be seen as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, these
campaigns and strategies.
4. Cleaning cooperatives are influenced by their context
Campaigns to improve cleaning jobs are more than just complements to cooperatives, and
business strategies pursued by more mainstream cleaning firms provide more than just lessons in
how to run a competitive business. They also exert a strong influence on the market for cleaning
services and on the labor market conditions cleaning workers experience. The high level of
unionization in Boston's janitorial industry has no doubt "raised the bar" for how much property
managers expect to pay, allowing a cleaning cooperative to charge higher rates and maintain high
wages. A strong union presence also means that the alternatives available to workers are much
better than they might be in places with weaker unions, possibly diminishing the significance of
this wage benefit.
The growth and visibility of maid service companies also influences the market for cleaning
services. These companies accustom households to paying higher prices for cleaning work and
to dealing with a cleaning service rather than an individual. This paves the way for firms like
Eco-cleaning to compete with independent cleaners, who may charge less, by projecting the
"professional" image customers have come to expect. The role of a cooperative business and its
opportunity set are thus both dependent on a context of market conditions shaped by unions and
other cleaning businesses.
Recommendations
These findings suggest a range of possible strategies to improve the chances of cooperatives
successfully competing in the house and office cleaning industries. Strategies to bolster
cooperatives may take two forms: developing more supportive partnerships and networks, and
improving the cooperative's structure. These findings also suggest the need for approaches that
address the problems faced by cleaning workers more generally. In the following section, I will
describe strategies that fall into each of these three categories.
1. Partnerships and collaborations
One lesson from Maids, Inc. and Service Cleaning is that supportive networks and associations
are important for business success. This lesson may be creatively adapted to a cooperative's
unique opportunity set. Strategies that seek to create and strengthen ties with potential
collaborators could help a small coop achieve some of the benefits of scale and visibility.
a. Build collaborative relationships among cleaning cooperatives
One major strength of the Maids, Inc. franchise model is its ability to achieve economies of scale
while operating like a network of small businesses. Each franchise targets a particular area in a
city, which cuts down on travel time between clients. Each franchise owner is able to draw on
the experiences and advice of other owners within the Maids, Inc. network. The visibility of
being associated with a recognized brand name gives these small businesses a distinct advantage
over their competitors. Cleaning coops could take this lesson to heart and develop supportive
networks of their own. There are already two cleaning coops in Boston, and several other CDCs
have expressed an interest in sponsoring a new cooperative cleaning business. Cooperation
among these businesses may be a partial solution to problems of a fragmented customer base,
limited access to information, and limited visibility.
There would be a number of obstacles to designing and implementing this proposal. It would
entail agreement among members of several different coops, more meetings, and possibly a
greater loss of member autonomy over decision-making. One woman at a Los Angeles
cooperative noted that they tried collaborating with another coop, but found that their approaches
and goals were too different to successfully work together. This may point to the wisdom of
creating a loose agreement among cleaning cooperatives to divide up their service area, share
information, and collaborate on advertising, while retaining member control over the structure
and operation of each business.
b. Build relationships with other kinds of cooperative businesses
A central principle of cooperative ownership is "cooperation among cooperatives". This has
taken a number of forms, from the network of cooperatives in Mondragon, Spain that collaborate
on production, distribution, education, and finance, and have established their own bank, to the
Network of Bay Area Worker Co-ops that provides its members with shared services and
facilitates information exchange. There is currently an effort underway to develop a stronger
network of Boston cooperatives. The discussion of what such a network would look like has
included suggestions for joint advertising, information sharing, agreements to purchase each
other's products and services, and network-wide health insurance, accounting, phone, and
banking services. Shared training, and even the development of formal agreements that would
allow worker-members from one cooperative to have preference for job openings in other
cooperatives, are also possible boons such a network could provide.
Because this discussion is already happening in Boston, Eco-cleaning may wish to look into how
they might participate in the new network. Coops in other parts of the country may benefit from
similar initiatives in their respective areas. This would address problems of visibility and help
them to more effectively target a high end niche market for their environmentally and socially
sound services. It also may allow them to offer better benefits to members at a lower price:
Service Cleaning is able to provide a great pension plan and health benefits because the union
pools funds from multiple companies and administers the program. It may be easier to attract
new members and to motivate current members if employment opportunities in other cooperative
businesses are part of the membership package. At the very least, other coops in the network
could agree to purchase janitorial services from Eco-cleaning.
Of course, building these relationships is a time intensive and potentially difficult process. More
meetings, limited English skills of members, and cultural differences between immigrant
cleaning workers and white collar professional coop members may impede the success of such a
collaboration. It nonetheless seems to hold promise for improving the competitive advantage of
these small cleaning cooperatives through developing a network to facilitate access to
information and customers, and lowering the cost of providing services to members.
c. Secure more government contracts
Cooperative cleaning firms must struggle to find stable contracts with a decent profit margin.
This is no new thing in the cleaning industry, but is especially difficult for a small start-up
business with no contacts and inexperienced management. If, as I have argued, these coops
provide substantial benefits to their members, the government may actively support these efforts
on the demand side by giving cooperative cleaning businesses preference for contracts cleaning
public spaces, office buildings, and housing projects.
The government can also support cleaning cooperatives by incorporating them into programs that
provide other social goods. As mentioned earlier, several California coops have received special
training to participate in HUD's Healthy Homes Initiative, which offers a steady stream of high
paid work stabilizing environmental hazards in homes. Quebec initiated a program to offer up to
60,000 seniors, handicapped or low-income families access to government subsidized
housecleaning, provided by a network of non-profit groups and cooperative businesses
(Thompson 1996). Securing agreements from the government to grant cooperatives preference
for these contracts will require greater visibility and probably the application of some pressure.
This ties back to the importance of developing strong relationships with other cooperative
businesses that would help them to build visibility and bargaining power.
2. Cooperative structure and management
These various forms of collaboration and support promise to improve the opportunities available
to cooperatives. These small businesses will be unable to take advantage of these opportunities,
however, if they do not possess the internal capacity to take on larger numbers of clients and
assure them that they will provide a consistent, high quality service. Cooperatives face the added
difficulty of coordinating multiple owners and managing a sensitive set of relationships among
owners, the manager, and any employees the company may hire. Developing a strong business
plan and an effective set of decision-making structures is thus essential for the success of these
cooperatives.
a. Target a client mix of offices and houses
Eco-cleaning members prefer to shift toward cleaning more offices, because the work is easier
and more consistent. However, they are generally unable to capitalize on their image as a
socially responsible company when bidding for office contracts. To be able to support a small
cleaning business, it is important to continue to maintain a proportion of higher paying house
cleaning jobs. The importance of cleaning a mix of offices and houses was emphasized by
members and managers of several cooperatives.
b. Adopt a flexible scheduling and pricing system for house cleaning
Maids, Inc. and other popular maid service chains have demonstrated the benefits of adopting
more flexible scheduling and pricing. Lining up several houses in one place, each scheduled
loosely and billed by the job rather than by the hour, seems to work well for both the customers
and the workers. Several cleaning cooperatives successfully use flexible scheduling and pricing,
and Eco-cleaning members are pushing for adoption of a similar system. This system does not
work for office contracts, suggesting the importance of developing two systems for the two
different kinds of customers.
c. Develop a clear structure for making decisions
The cooperative literature places a strong emphasis on the importance of developing a clear
delineation among decision-making roles and responsibilities. This is an important part of
successfully managing a business with many owners, a hired manager, and several employees.
Eco-cleaning has been trying to move toward this, but members still struggle to effectively
communicate changes they would like the manager to make. Discussing different decisionmaking models with other cooperatives may help them to develop a system that minimizes these
conflicts.
d. Train members in management skills
Members will be unable to make informed decisions that are in the company's interest without
the necessary management skills. Ongoing training in how to manage the cooperative's finances,
communicate with customers, and market their services is essential for empowering members to
supervise their manager. The case of Heaven's Sent, a profitable California cooperative that is
managed entirely by committees of members, demonstrates that clear decision-making structures
and the development of member skills can be complementary components of a successful
cooperative.
e. Structure clear rewards and incentives for new workers
One of the biggest obstacles to growth Eco-cleaning faces is the difficulty attracting and retaining
new workers. This is a problem throughout the cleaning industry, but is particularly acute for a
small business that is able to offer new employees only part time hours, low pay, and no benefits.
Other cooperatives have attracted new workers by structuring predictable pay raises, and
developing a clear process whereby each new employee is considered a "member in training".
Eco-cleaning requires that new workers be with the firm for a year before they are able to become
a member, which is twice the six month average among other coops. None have yet come close
to staying with the company this long. Giving new workers an "easy in" may be difficult for
members who have fought for several years to build up their business, but it may also be
necessary if the coop hopes to grow and to extend the benefits of ownership to other workers in
the community.
3. Strategies to improve outcomes for cleaning workers
Cooperatives are not for everyone, and cleaning workers will continue to face the problems
characteristic of the low-skilled jobs held by most recent immigrants to this country. Constant
downward pressure on wages, limited opportunities for training and mobility, and strict
hierarchies of control are all part of the experience of cleaning work. Strategies to address these
problems must take into account the diverse range of educational background, future goals, and
perceived obstacles these workers bring to their jobs. Below I briefly describe several strategies
that address the most pressing needs I have observed over the course of this research.
a. Teach immigrant workers English
In almost all of my interviews with Latino cleaning workers, I heard variations on the theme: I
clean because I do not speak English. This is obviously a concern, particularly for those
immigrants who came to this country with a college education and experience working as a
professional, have lived here for over ten years, and continue to work for janitorial firms because
they never learned English. There is no dearth of free ESL classes, held at flexible hours and
accessible locations. Finding the time to take these classes and study for them is, however, often
a challenge for those individuals who must work several jobs to make ends meet.
One possible solution to this problem is to offer ESL training at the work site prior to each
cleaning shift. Lado notes that a group of volunteers in Boston tried this in a downtown office
building and found the classes to be very popular, but encountered resistance from the company
that employed these workers (1994, p.71). The union may be able to use its leverage to offer
more of these ESL classes on site.
Another more controversial solution is to offer intensive ESL training to new immigrants,
accompanied by enough of a subsidy to support them during this period. A refugee program I
visited in Atlanta offers three two hour English classes daily for the first two months after arrival.
During that time, the refugees are supported by the government. There are obvious obstacles to
extending such a generous program to all new immigrants, but the benefits of moving welleducated professionals quickly into better paying jobs, as well as giving individuals with less
education a set of skills necessary to advance in their jobs, may be worth the public investment.
b. Build and maintain strong organizations that represent worker interests
English may help workers to move out of cleaning jobs and cooperatives may provide a good
alternative to mainstream cleaning jobs. Large numbers of immigrants will, however, continue
to work for firms like Service Cleaning and Maids, Inc. or as independent house cleaners. The
interests of these workers are best protected and advanced by organizations that are able to
pressure employers and government officials to be more responsive to their needs.
Unions are the most visible of these organizations. In Chapter 3, I described the positive
outcomes SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaigns have secured for cleaning workers in a number
of cities. The strong union presence in Boston has played an important role in pulling up wages
and working conditions in the cleaning industry. Strengthening unions in places where they are
now weak will help to extend these improvements to a larger group of janitorial workers in the
industry. House cleaning workers could also stand to benefit from union representation. This
has historically been a difficult proposition, but the growth of large, multi-national maid service
companies may provide a window of opportunity for unionization efforts.
There are still many cleaning workers who are not protected by unions, and many union locals
that are not responsive to the needs of their immigrant members. Other organizations based in
the communities where these workers live have stepped in to fill this gap. Immigrant worker
centers, also described in Chapter 3, represent some of the more successful examples. One
important role they have played is in pressuring unions to be more responsive to their immigrant
workforce (Fine 1997, Lado 1994).
The question of how best to strengthen these organizations and extend their reach is easily the
subject of a second research paper. As my focus is on cooperatives, I will refer the interested
reader to Fine (1997) and Ness (1998) who discuss the evolving role of worker centers, and Fisk
et al. (2000) and Waldinger et al. (1998), who evaluate the success of SEIU's Justice For Janitors
campaigns. I have already emphasized the benefits cooperatives and their workers derive from
the efforts of these organizations. Coops cannot replace them, but should continue to exist
alongside them, as an alternative employment option within an industry that must at the same
time be pressured to provide decent pay and working conditions for all cleaning workers.
Final words
I began this paper by placing cooperatives within a broader discussion of how one evaluates
outcomes from a community economic development strategy. While purely economic measures
of success are certainly important to the people who support and participate in these programs,
the question of how to value the less tangible outcomes remains a difficult one to answer. In the
cooperative I have studied, wages, benefits, and business success are not sufficient to understand
the true worth of cooperative ownership to its members. The stated aims of community
economic development, to enhance a range of social and economic goods, are necessarily vague
and subject to interpretation. The confusion becomes clear when an agency attempts to evaluate
the success of its programs, which often have multiple goals and ambiguous outcomes.
The experiences of the members of Eco-cleaning add something to this discussion, by
incorporating the perspectives of those served by a community economic development program.
They demonstrate that poverty is not just about low wages, but is also about a feeling of
frustration with the low status, lack of control, and limited opportunities most low-wage jobs
provide. They also point to the possibility that the people in these programs make their own
trade-offs when deciding whether to participate, a choice which should be respected in the final
analysis of a program's impact and effect.
Cooperatives are a solution that requires a commitment to improving these more intangible
negative outcomes, and a sensitivity on the part of a sponsoring organization to the difficulty of
achieving a full range of benefits in one fell swoop. The sustainability and growth of these
businesses is certainly important, and warrants careful attention to the details of business
management and structure. The promise cooperatives hold as a community economic
development strategy, however, extends beyond most easily quantifiable measures of success, as
expressed most vividly by those who have founded and benefited from these businesses. In the
final analysis, control and ownership do contribute to the range of outcomes we should consider
when evaluating the impact of such a strategy. Cleaning cooperatives have demonstrated their
potential to improve employment outcomes for low-wage workers; the task ahead is to help them
to develop as viable businesses capable of sustaining the possibility of cooperative ownership
and extending the reach of its effects.
Appendix A
Individuals Interviewed*
Edith Binuelo
Worker-member
Pueblo Nuevo Enterprises, Inc.
Los Angeles, CA
Juana Hernandez
Director
Immigrant Workers Resource Center
Boston, MA
Yolanda Campbell
Director
Cooperative Development Institute
Greenfield, MA
Linda Kite
Former Manager, Dynamic Workers
Staff member, Strategic Action for a Just
Economy (SAJE)
Los Angeles, CA
Don Coleman
Union representative
SEIU Local 254
Boston, MA
Chris
Manager
Restif Cleaning Services
Arcada, CA
E. Kim Coontz
Director
UC-Davis Center for Cooperatives
Davis, CA
Carlos DiSilva
Union Representative
SEIU Local 254
Boston, MA
Sinesio Flores
Worker-member
Always Ready (Siempre Listo)
Los Angeles, CA
* The names of workers and managers
interviewed are not listed to protect their
confidentiality
Anna Olsen
Technical Assistance Director and NonToxic Professional Housecleaning
Manager
Women's Action to Gain Economic
Security (WAGES)
Mountain View, CA
Otto Rodriguez
Manager
Manos Janitorial Services
San Francisco, CA
George Schultze
Professor, priest, and former board
member of Listo Cooperative of Day
Laborers
Los Angeles, CA
Appendix B
Interview Questions for Workers*
Name
Date of Interview
Position
Time of
Interview
Country
A. Background
Al. First, tell me a little bit about where you worked before coming to this company.
How did you come to be working in this job?
B. Wages and Benefits
B 1. What is your hourly wage at this company?
B2. Do you get paid for travel time between jobs, or just for the hours you work in the
office/house?
B3. How much is charged per hour/per person for the cleaning work?
B4. Do you receive the following benefits:
a. Health insurance
___
b. Worker's compensation
c. Social Security
d. General Liability Insurance
__
e.
__
Pension
f. Paid vacation
g.
Other
B5. How many hours do you currently work in the cleaning business each week?
B6. Do you work other job(s) to supplement your wages? If so, why (not enough hours
available at cleaning job, employment not stable, benefits better at other job, hours are
more flexible)?
C. Wages and Benefits at other cleaning jobs
Cl. What other cleaning companies do you/ have you worked for? When did you work
for them? Did they do mostly house cleaning or office cleaning? Was there a union at
any of them?
C2. What was your hourly wage at these other companies?
C3. Did you get paid for travel time between jobs, or just for the hours you worked in the
office/house?
C4. How much was charged per hour/per person for the cleaning work?
C5. Did you receive the following benefits:
a. Health insurance
__
b. Worker's compensation
c. Social Security
d. General Liability Insurance
e.
_
Pension
* Note: These questions were usually asked in Spanish, and the interviews usually did not follow precisely
the order and structure shown on this form.
f.
Paid vacation
g.
Other
C6. Did you work other job(s) to supplement your wages? If so, why (not enough hours
available at cleaning job, employment not stable, benefits better at other job, hours are
more flexible)?
D. Success as a Business
D1. Do you think your business/cleaning business you work for is profitable, growing,
doing a good job? Why or why not?
D2. Do you think the cleaning business is managed well?
D3. What are the greatest strengths of the business you own/work for? What will help it
to grow/become more profitable?
D4. What do you see as the biggest challenges for the business to earn a profit?
D5. Do you think this company will provide stable employment for you in the future?
Why or why not?
Work Experience
Control
E. Organization of work
El. How are the hours that you are going to work decided?
a. Individually
b. Ina group
c. By the manager
d. Other
___
E2. If you have an emergency, or cannot work for some reason, are there any
consequences?
E3. Do you like the way that hours are decided in your job? Is it important to you to
have a flexible schedule? Why or why not?
E4. How do you decide how you are going to clean a house
a. Individually
b. With my partner(s)
_
c. Management decides: there are a set of rules and norms
d. Some combination: describe
E5. Do you like this way of deciding how you are going to clean a house?
E6. How are the following affected by this way of deciding how you will work?
Strongly improved (1) Somewhat improved (2) Neither improved nor worsened (3)
Somewhat worsened (4) Strongly worsened (5)
a. speed
b. repetitiveness
c. quality of work
d. safety
e. fatigue
f. stress
E7. What are other benefits/drawbacks to cleaning in this way?
E8. Does the company reward you or penalize you for speed, efficiency, and/or quality
of work? How?
E9. Do you like the way this is done? Why or why not?
E10. How does your experience of control over your work in this company compare with
experiences in other cleaning companies?
F. Organization of the business
Fl. Wages, benefits, and spending
How are wages, benefits, and spending decided?
a. Individually
b. Ina group
c. Management decides
d. Other
__
Do you like this way of deciding? What are the benefits/drawbacks?
Would you like to have more say in these things? Why/why not?
F2. Clients
How are your clients decided?
a. Individually
b. Ina group
c. Management decides
d. Other
__
Do you like this way of deciding? What are the benefits/drawbacks?
Would you like to have more say about clients? Why/why not?
F3. What other decisions are important to the business, and how are they made?
F4. Overall, do you feel you have:
a. Too little control over how the company is run
b. The right amount of control
c. Too much control: I would rather just work
F5. If given the choice, would you rather work at a cleaning company where you had
more control over how you work and how the business is run?
G. Opportunities for advancement, training, and skill development
G1. How long have you been at
?
G2. In that time, what kind of training did you receive, how long was the training, and
how many times did you receive it?
G3. Are there other skills you have gained from working in this company?
G4. Has this training or have these skills been useful in your job? Please describe how
you have used the skills - specific examples are the best.
G5. Do you think this training/ these skills will be useful in future jobs? Explain.
G6. Are there other reasons why this training/ these skills are valuable to you?
G7. In the time that you have been at
,
have your wages/benefits changed? How
often and how much?
G8. If they have increased, why (time with the company, more profits, I work more
efficiently now, everyone's wages went up, I got a different job in the company)?
G9. Is it possible to move up to a better paying job in your company? Do you think you
have a good chance of being promoted in this way?
G10. How do these opportunities compare to those in other cleaning jobs that you have
had?
H. Job satisfaction
HI. Why do you do cleaning work? Do you enjoy this work?
H2. Do you like working at
H3. How does your job at
? Why?
compare to other jobs you have had, particularly other
cleaning jobs?
H4. Think back to the questions I have asked about control, training, and wages, and
business success. How would you rank the importance of these things to your feeling of
satisfaction with your job:
a. wages/benefits
b. business success
c. control over work
d. control over business
e. opportunities for advancement, training
Why did you rank them in this order?
H5. Did the importance you place on any of these things influence your decision to work
for this company?
H6. Other comments?
Appendix C
Interview questions for managers of cleaning companies*
Name
Date of Interview
Position
Time of
interview
Company
A. Background
Al. First, can you give me a brief history of your company: when was it started, how and
when did you become manager/owner, how many people started with the company and
how many work there now?
A2. What are your specific responsibilities in the company
B. Wages and Benefits
B 1. What are the different positions in your company? How many employees do you
have in each of these positions? How many (what %) are part time positions?
B2. What is the hourly wage paid by your company for each position? Does this differ
by job; seniority; performance?
B3. Are workers paid for travel time between jobs? For gas mileage?
B4. What benefits are given to workers (health insurance, workers compensation, social
security, general liability insurance, pension, paid vacation, other)? How is it
determined: do they have to be with the company for a certain period or be full time
workers?
B5. How many hours are usually worked by employees each week?
C. Business Success
Cl. Can you give me the following information for the last few years:
" Profit/loss
Number of contracts
e
* Monthly sales
Last year's sales growth
e
* Projected growth
" Total assets
* Cash reserves
* Company equity
C2. How much is charged per person/per hour for cleaning work? Or if you estimate
cost based on the job, how is this done?
C3. How are profits distributed (to shareholders, owners, administrative work, wages,
benefits)?
C4. What is your target market?
C5. Can you tell me a little bit about strategies you use in the following areas:
" Marketing
* Customer service
Note: These questions were asked in English and the interviews usually did not follow precisely the order
and structure shown on this form.
*
Evaluation of the business and of employees
e
Setting goals for the business
e Recruiting employees
" Training employees
C6. What do you see as the key strengths of your business that has allowed it to succeed?
Do you hope to build on these strengths to increase sales? How?
C7. What do you see as the most significant barriers to achieving profitability/success?
"
Control
D. Organization of work
D1. How are the hours that cleaning employees work decided?
D2. If there is an emergency, or someone can't work, are there consequences for the
employee?
D3. How is the decision made about how the house/office is to be cleaned? (By the
manager, by workers)
Why is it made in this way?
D4. How are the following affected by this way of deciding how work is done:
Strongly improved (1) Somewhat improved (2) Neither improved nor worsened (3)
Somewhat worsened (4) Strongly worsened (5)
e
speed
" quality of work
D5. Does the company reward or penalize workers for the speed, efficiency, or quality of
their work?
E. Organization of Business
El. How are wages, benefits, and spending decided? Do workers participate in making
these decisions? If so, how do they participate?
E2. How are clients chosen? Is there a screening process? Can workers choose which
clients to work for (consideration for health issues, etc.?)
E3. What other day-to-day and longer term decisions are important to the business?
How are they made?
E4. Do you feel workers participate too little (1), the right amount (2), or too much (3) in
the management of the company/ in the making of business decisions?
F. Opportunities for advancement, training, and skill development
Fl. What kind of training do you offer employees? How many times is this training
offered, how long does it last, when do employees receive this training?
F2. How do you decide which employees to train?
F3. What other skills do employees gain at this company?
F4. Do you think employees will use these skills in future jobs?
F5. How often do salaries increase and by how much? Do you have any specific
figures?
F6. Are wages and benefit increases associated with performance or business success?
Tenure?
F7. How long do employees usually stay with the company? Again, any figures on
employee hiring, tenure, and turnover for the past year, several years?
F8. What internal job ladders - opportunities for advancement within the company exist?
F9. How likely is it that employees will be internally promoted to these jobs? Any
examples?
G. Job Satisfaction
GI. Do you feel these are good jobs? Do employees like working here? Why?
G2. How do these jobs compare to other cleaning jobs?
G3. What about your own job: do you enjoy managing this company? Why? Why did
you decide to do this kind of work?
H. Additional Comments
Appendix D
Interview questions for cleaning cooperatives*
Name
Date
Country
Years with company
Company
Position
1. What is the history of the cooperative? How did it get started (core group of
members came together and decided to start coop, outside organization initiated the
process, etc.), how many people started it, how many people work there now
(workers vs. Members)?
2. How is the cooperative managed (by members, by a paid manager)?
3. What are the wages paid to members? Do these differ with seniority, skill?
4. Do workers receive benefits, and if so, what are they? Do workers have benefits
through other jobs?
5. How much is charged for your service? Who is your target market, and how do you
advertise?
6. Do you provide training to members and employees? What opportunities do
worker/members have to move up within the company?
7. Do you feel these jobs are better than other cleaning jobs? Why?
8. What is the relationship between the cooperative and the parent group? How did the
cooperative evolve and change as it grew? Are you independent, and when did you
become independent?
9. What is the relationship between members and other workers? How long is a worker
with the cooperative before they are able to apply for membership?
10. How do you do financial planning? What lessons have you learned from managing
the finances of the cooperative?
11. What kinds of contracts do you have with different organizations in the area in which
you work? For example, do you work with the local unions?
12. How do you conduct evaluations? Do workers evaluate themselves, or do managers
evaluate them?
13. Do you reward or penalize workers for speed/efficiency/skill?
14. Are you making a profit? Loss? Do you get support from foundations/organizations,
or are you self-sufficient?
15. What have been your biggest successes? To what do you attribute these successes,
why do you think you have been successful?
16. What are your greatest weaknesses, or obstacles, as a company? Are there any
changes you are making, or hope to make in the future?
Note: These questions were asked in English or in Spanish. Interviews usually did not follow precisely
the order and structure shown on this form.
*
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